“Better is the poor who walks in his integrity than one [a DOJ lawyer or IRS agent] who is perverse in his lips and is a fool.” 
[Prov. 19:1, Bible, NKJV]

It is important that you thoroughly understand the process used to litigate a tax case long before you begin your tax litigation.  One very good reason is that even if you know all the right arguments, are organized, and can write and present well to a jury, the government will attempt to try to defeat your case based on an obtuse technicality.  In fact, they will use any excuse they can to avoid confronting the substantive issues of your claim or defense or putting themselves into the position where they have to argue against the merits of your arguments, because then their arguments will go on the court record for all to see if the judge decides to make your case published.  The most common technicalities they try to destroy your case with are listed below, in descending order of frequency.  The government will:

1.        Claim that service of process on the government was insufficient so the case needs to be dismissed.  That is why the Tax Fraud Prevention Manual tells you how to properly serve process upon the government in section 6.10.

2.        Empty your assets and bank accounts out using a bogus Notice of Levy or Levy just before you go to trial so you can’t pay your lawyer.  This is obviously grand theft, but it does happen.  Sometimes, they will even steal your car while you are inside the courtroom.  This happened to the client of one tax attorney we know.  Thieves!  The best way to guard against this is to protect all your assets before you launch your litigation so they can’t plunder your war chest.

3.        Move to dismiss your case on the basis that it “fails to state a claim under which relief can be granted”.  Section 6.8.1 of the Tax Fraud Prevention Manual describes in detail how to develop a claim upon which relief can be granted so you can avoid this pitfall.

4.        Try to claim your arguments are frivolous and threaten you with a sanction for frivolous pleadings.  At the same time, they will fail to specifically identify their meaning of frivolous, which incidentally is a violation of due process, and will refuse to specify exactly why your arguments are frivolous.  We tell you in section ‎2.4.3 how to prevent charges of being “frivolous” and how to defend yourself against such charges.

5.        Try to strike your motion (have it nullified and removed from the court record) because it is frivolous or incomplete or prejudices their case.

6.        Delay resolution of the case by requesting continuances from the judge and dragging their feet during discovery and setting a trial date.  This is designed to increase your legal expenses and test your patience and endurance in hopes that you will run out of money before the case goes to trial.  The DOJ typically has sixty days to respond to your initial petition.  If they don’t know how to respond because you petition is especially damning, they will file repeated applications with the court to extend their time to respond and they will do it every 60 days to delay things indefinitely.

7.        Just before your case goes to trial if you are the plaintiff, they might try to indict you on criminal charges so your attention is diverted away from completing the case while you are in jail.  That way, by the time you get out of jail, the statute of limitations will have run out and they won’t have to confront your issues.  This very tactic was the one used against Lynne Meredith, author of one of the books we recommend called Vultures in Eagle’s Clothing and a famous tax freedom fighter.  Lynne was raided illegally by the IRS in 1999 and filed a civil suit against the IRS for damages.  She then depositioned 40 different IRS agents acting in pro per and had a very good chance of winning according to the judge, so much so that the IRS used the evidence they had stolen illegally from her during the raid and used it to try to convict her, getting her thrown in jail on criminal charges just before her civil case went to trial in 2002.  The government conveniently gave the criminal case to a prejudiced judge who was on the IRS’ side and who said he wouldn’t grant her bail unless she shut down her business and her marketing efforts and her website, which cut off the cash flow she needed to defend herself.

8.        The court or the opposing DOJ counsel might conveniently lose your pleadings for the case.  They will wait until the trial or hearing and then use this as an excuse to keep delaying or continuing the trial or hearing.  For this reason, every pleading that you file, you should keep TWO stamped and signed copies of everything so that you can produce another copy of the pleading for the judge.  You should also ensure that the copies that you serve on opposing counsel do NOT have the court stamp or your signature.  Instead put “/s/” where your signature goes on the copy of the pleading going to opposing counsel so that the judge can’t use their copy of your pleading.  Opposing counsel like to doctor the pleadings you submit to prejudice your case by giving the doctored pleadings to the judge when he loses his.  If you don’t sign or stamp copies you give to the opposing counsel, then the judge can’t use them and he has to use yours!

9.        The judge may try to “pigeonhole” your case by refusing to rule properly on your case because it would or damage the government.   After you have a trial or hearing, he has a certain amount of time to file a signed judgment which is called the “term of court”, and what typically happens to pigeonholed cases is that he will allow the term of court to expire, and then file an annotation on the minutes of the case saying what the judgment was, but not filing an actual judgment.  Without an actual judgment, you can’t appeal and if he files a judgment late, and beyond the term of court, then the judgment is a void (null, without effect) judgment that you can challenge.  Judges certainly know their judgments are void when filed beyond the term of court but they will be hoping that you don’t know this and that you will honor the void judgment anyway.  They will then put ridiculous terms in the void judgment that will be especially burdensome or damaging for you.

10.     Instead of signing the final judgment, the judge will use a rubber stamp to sign it or have his clerk sign it by direction or using the stamp, in which case it is a void judgment.  He will do this to escape culpability for the judgment if he knows it is wrong or could subject him to personal liability.  That way, if he is later sued for the injurious and illegal judgment, he can claim he didn’t sign it.

11.     If the judge knows that his judgment would be obviously wrong or unjust or if it violates precedent or stare decisis, he may make the case unpublished so that it isn’t allowed to be referenced or cited as precedent for subsequent cases and so that his illegal handling of the case may be protected from disclosure.  This is an obvious and illegal obstruction of justice and the judge could be sued for such acts, but it frequently happens anyway.  Some courts are waking up to this injustice.  For instance, the eighth circuit court of federal appeals recently declared unpublished opinions unconstitutional.

12.     The judge may order you not to file any pleadings in the court any longer, and subject you to fines if you do.  This technique is used to damage your right of free speech.  The judge typically does this if you are a frequent or “vexatious” litigant who raises issues that are especially embarrassing or damaging for the government.  The government did this to Rodney Stich so they could prevent being publicly embarrassed by his very damning evidence.  Rodney Stich wrote an expose book on the FAA called Unfriendly Skies and was persecuted because he litigated to end corruption in the government that was exposed in the book.

You must expect that the government will be very devious, unfair, dishonest, evasive of the truth, and underhanded.  That is the only way they have been able to perpetuate the fraud of the income tax and fool so many innocent Americans for so long.  If they had told the truth consistently and in their publications, after all, the fraud of the income tax would have been exposed long ago and imploded on itself as it rightfully deserves.  The IRS therefore has two faces that are completely opposite of each other in the most hypocritical show in existence.  You must completely understand and more importantly respect both of these faces if you will defeat this beast:

·         The pleasant and cooperative one they show the media and Congress during hearings.  They will brag, for instance, about how many phone calls they have answered in their “helpful” 800 line, how they are giving tax credits to the victims of 9-11, unclaimed refunds, and other such propaganda.  They won’t even mention that their phone agents cannot be held liable for giving downright wrong advice, and that they refuse to identify themselves so you can’t sue them.

·         An evil, criminal, covetous, lying, good old boy network which behind the scenes is nothing but a gangster/Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO)  ring that will do anything to keep the truth from coming out.  They will scare the public by saying they “are hiring thousands”, as they did during 2001 on their website.  Their number one mission is to keep sheep/people afraid and compliant so the extortion payments continue coming.  They maintain the fear through automated anonymous threatening mail that constitutes stalking, harassment, and mailing of threatening communications in violation of 18 U.S.C. §876.  They hide behind a cloak of anonymity and refuse to identify the names of their employees.  They refuse to respond to FOIA requests about the persons handling your case so you can sue them for criminal wrongdoing.  They silence and penalize and harass the whistleblowers and freedom fighters.  They will put a spin on the story they release to the media about the persecution to deflect public ridicule for their misdeeds.  They will wrongfully accuse and prosecute people for things that aren’t even crimes and which are outside of their territorial or subject matter jurisdiction, and most of the time they will win because the victims they choose very carefully will either be ignorant of the law and their rights, or have an ignorant counsel who is on the take and who volunteers to rig the case in order to avoid his next audit with the IRS behind the scenes.  They will falsify and doctor a person’s IMF file to make it appear as though they have a legitimate liability and cover it up by refusing FOIA requests for the record.  And they will try to make the person out as a “taxpayer” to shift the burden of disproving their liability in order to escape this fraud.  This is why we show you how to request and decode your IMF file in section 3.4.5 .

The IRS chief counsel and the DOJ lawyers he works with in prosecuting tax crimes will do anything to win and the end justifies the means for these crooks.  They will implement their legal oppression of your rights more successfully because you helped them win.  How?  They have a big war chest full of YOUR money which they STOLE to use against you, which prejudiced your rights in the process because you don’t have enough money to hire a lawyer to defend yourself against their extortion and legal and courtroom harassment.  It’s a very vicious assault on your rights and your liberties and they hit you right in the weak spot you created by being a gullible citizen and volunteering to pay the very income tax that made you unable to afford a lawyer to later defend your right to stop paying it.

This section will therefore attempt to briefly summarize the tax litigation sequence and give you some succinct and helpful tips on where to focus your litigation efforts and more importantly, where NOT to focus your efforts so that you will have a better chance of winning.  The content of this section was derived in part from a fascinating book entitled Tax Fraud & Evasion: The War Stories , written by a seasoned tax attorney and personal friend of ours, Donald Macpherson, who we affectionately refer to as “Capt Mac” in this section.  His website is located at:

Capt Mac says in his fascinating book that the IRS fights with the same dirty guerilla tactics as those of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) that he fought against during an 18 month stint in the Army in Vietnam as a Green Beret.  His book is peppered with anecdotes of his war years that he effectively uses as metaphors to describe his tactics and battles against the IRS.  The part of Mac’s book that talks about the trial sequence is pages 51 through 52.  You can learn more about the sequence below by reading the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which we mention in the following section.  Another helpful source to understand this process is found in the local rules for the specific court you will be litigating in, which we mention subsequently in section ‎2.5.5.5.  If you would like to know more about the fundamentals of federal tax litigation, we refer you to a much more complete treatment found in chapter 11 of this book.  The column entitled “Applicable Court Rule(s)” comes from either the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) or the court rules for the Ninth Circuit, California Southern District Court, in San Diego, Calif, which you can view on the web at:

Below is the typical process involved in litigating a criminal tax trial:

Table 8-9: Litigation sequence for a criminal trial relating to income taxes