From the April 2000 Idaho Observer:

Schiff sends powerful message to taxpayers

SPOKANE, Wash. -- The nation's most notorious and arguably most successful income tax protestor Irwin Schiff gave a two-day seminar at the beautiful Hotel Lusso March 25-26. “If you pay income taxes, you are submitting to extortion, you're not paying taxes,” said Schiff.

The cornerstone of Schiff's most recent procedures that he guarantees will allow people to legally stop paying income taxes is the filing of a “Zero” tax return. “When you learn that the definition of 'income' is 'corporate profit,' you will find that the 'zero' tax return is the most honest tax return you can ever file,” Schiff explained.

Most people who get into trouble with the IRS are ultimately convicted of willful failure to file. According to Schiff, the courts have determined that a “zero” return is, indeed, a return, so they cannot throw you in prison for not filing. The rest of the game is to prove that by definition, you have no income and, therefore, are not liable for the tax.

Schiff, 73, who has spent the last 25 years investigating the illegality of the income tax and the Social Security tax, gave a powerful message to seminar attendees: You have the law and the Constitution on your side, learn the materials, demand that the IRS audit you and take control of what belongs to you. Schiff spent a great deal of time allowing seminar attendees to participate in a role-playing exercise that would help to prepare “zero” tax returnees to effectively take control of an IRS interview.

“There is nothing wrong with the law,” Schiff said over and over again. He explained that the federal government knows income is corporate profit and that it cannot legally tax the wages of working people. You also learn from the IRS Code Book and statements from several government officials that the tax return that most Americans fill out is a voluntary, self-assessment that the IRS is not authorized to assess for you -- unless you are a corporation or involved in the commerce of tobacco,alcohol or firearms.

Former Clinton administration IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner said that continued exposure of the IRS' unauthorized abuse of the American people will, “.undermine Americans' willingness to pay their taxes voluntarily” and “.may have some impact on our self-assessment system.”

Milner made that comment right after she announced her resignation as the IRS' top tax collector.

Further proof of the scam is found in the Individual Master File (IMF) that the IRS keeps on its taxpayers. Several people have made Freedom of Information Act requests and have gotten a file that is deeply encoded. When properly decoded, the file has us all labeled as corporations. “The government has to fool its own computers into thinking that wages are income,” Schiff commented.

He even cites sections where the code outlines how to punish revenuers who act beyond the scope of their legally limited authority to harass and intimidate the public.

The problem is that people don't know the difference between wages and income and are then the victims of federal extortion through threats, coercion and the IRS' legally unsupported claims that it has the right to seize property, arbitrarily attach fines and imprison people who do not pay income taxes.

Schiff proves his points by systematically citing a fascinating web of regulations that has taken him years of study to understand and incorporate into procedures that free the hardworking people of this country from the bondage of illegal income taxes. To make things easy, Freedom Books (See ad page 17) sells tabbed and highlighted versions of the IRS Code Book for $78. To people who have suspected that their government is capable of lying to them, Schiff's tour through the IRS Code Book is like pulling an onion from last year's garden and peeling the slimy, pungent thing until discovering a Cracker Jack toy is at its core.

What the finance and economics major from the University of Connecticut proved to everyone in the room was that, by law, unless we are a corporation doing business with the permission of the government, or unless we are involved in the commerce of alcohol or tobacco, we are not obligated to pay the income tax and the IRS does not have the authority, according to its own rules, to force us to pay the income tax.

Understanding that the federal government does not care about what is legal or illegal (we need not cite examples here, the reader can list them himself), the problem becomes whether or not the individual is brave enough to look Goliath in the eye and challenge his authority to steal money. Schiff puts it rather bluntly: “What would you rather have -- a bill of rights or an income tax. You can't have them both. Of course, the easiest thing to do is submit to extortion.”

One of the documents Schiff provided to illustrate how the government is operating illegally is in the obscure 1947 case Federal Crop Insurance Corporation v. Merrill. “Anyone entering into an arrangement with the government takes the risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the government stays within the bounds of his authority even though the agent himself may be unaware of the limitations upon his authority,” the judges ruled.

It may just be one obscure ruling, but it reflects the prevailing attitude among government officials and people in general to always be pushing the envelope with what we can get away with. According to this ruling, human nature and experience, we know that it is our responsibility to always challenge authority because there is a strong possibility that there isn't any except for that which is created through fear.

Aside from having spent the last quarter century battling the federal government on the income tax front and knowing his material inside out, Schiff is an excellent public speaker with a marvelous sense of humor. He is a master of card tricks and slight-of-hand and uses those skills to keep his audience awake and participating in their reeducation process. His attitude is so cavalier and so confident that it appeared that most of the people who paid $150 to see him were ready to study the material and, when the time came, stand up for their rights, as carved into the laws of this land, and defy the federal government's insistence upon taking from them what does not belong to them.

“Organized crime in the United States begins with the federal government,” Schiff said. By the time you have spent two days with him and have seen the documents and listened to what he has been through, you will know that he is right. Schiff also has a reputation of not abandoning the people who follow his procedures.

An IRS agent reportedly admitted that, of the 63 million people that are no longer filing income taxes, Schiff is responsible for approximately 1 million of them.

As a speaker, Schiff is second to none in his fluidity, his organization and his likeable and often humorous and magical presentation. He has written numerous books (a total of 400,000 books in print), has produced many videos, audio tapes, has a newsletter called “The Schiff Report.” He is in perpetual demand as a live speaker and radio program guest and hosts his own twice-weekly radio show.