parrhesia.com

Recently, one of my neighbors was acquitted in a federal criminal trial. The jury considered four charges: one count of conspiracy to defraud the government by impairing the calculation or collection of tax, and three counts of wilfully aiding the filing of amended income tax returns which were false with respect to a material matter.

My neighbor - Joe Banister, a former special agent for the IRS, is also licensed as a CPA. (”Special Agents” at IRS are considered federal law enforcement officers, who carry firearms, have the power to make arrests, and investigate criminal tax law violations; as opposed to “Revenue Agents” who conduct examinations (”audits”) or “Revenue Officers” who collect tax debts.

Apparently, at some point during Mr. Banister’s employment with IRS, he got sucked into one of the “tax protestor” movements, leading to his resignation from IRS. He has since published materials describing his there-is-no-income-tax theory, and apparently talked the owner of a Sacramento-area business into filing “zero returns”, which show that no tax is due, and hence all amounts withheld should be returned to the taxpayer (though that doesn’t seem like the right term for a zero return filer.)

It’s unfortunate that tax protestors are trying to use the acquittal to prove more than it does - it’s the jury’s decision that, in this case, the prosecutors didn’t prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Joe Banister committed the crimes he was charged with. Acquitting Joe Banister for conspiracy and filing a false return doesn’t prove that it’s legal to file a zero return any more than Michael Jackson’s acquittal proves that child molestation is legal - nor did the acquittals of Robert Blake and OJ Simpson prove that murder is legal.

I did find these notes sent by Banister’s jury to be interesting, though it’s tough to figure out exactly what the jury was thinking -

• Note requesting tapes, VCR, copy of 2000 version of 26 CFR (the IRS’ administrative regulations)
• Note requesting more tapes
• Note asking about relationship between CFR and Internal Revenue Code
• Note requesting flip chart
• Note announcing jury has reached unanimous verdict

So while it’s obviously a good result for Joe Banister, it’s not a good foundation for any sort of argument about whether or not it’s a good idea - or legally required - that US citizens and residents pay income tax.

In particular, it’s worth remembering that while Joe Banister managed to escape conviction, his client - the person who actually filed the zero returns at issue - is currently sitting in a federal prison after being convicted for tax fraud, as a result of filing the returns.

I haven’t read the trial transcripts, but my understanding is that Joe Banister’s argument was that, essentially, his role was that of a CPA preparing tax returns based on the legal and factual arguments of his client, and that it wasn’t reasonable to hold him - as a paid preparer - liable for the position that his client chose to take on the tax return.

Banister has also been disbarred from practice before the IRS, and disciplinary charges are apparently pending before the California Board of Accountancy.

Just to see if there’s an easy parallel to the More Guns Less Crime argument, I decided to compare the concealed carry permit issue rate to homicide rates. I found the California Dept of Justice’s page of homicide statistics per county per year. Turns out the five counties with the worst homicide rates in 2003 were:

Sierra .0286%
Inyo .0109%
Los Angeles .0107%
Mendocino .0102%
Alameda .0095%

and nine counties tied for the best, with no homicides in 2003:

Alpine
Amador
Colusa
Del Norte
Lassen
Marin
Mariposa
Modoc

There were two big surprises for me in those lists - that Sierra County turned out to have the worst rate, and that Marin County had no homicides in 2003. Looking at both counties over the longer time periods shown in the CA DOJ statistics, it looks like both entries are statistical outliers.

Sierra County only had two homicides during years 1994-2003; one in 1999 and one in 2003. If that one homicide in Sierra County in 2003 hadn’t happened, Sierra County would move from the county with the worst rate to tied for the best rate.

Marin County’s mean homicides per year during the years 1994-2003 was 2.7.

When the CA DOJ calculates homicide rates, they exclude counties with populations below 100,000 because they believe the statistics are misleading in that context. See Appendix I.

I happened to notice that the California Dept of Justice’s Firearms Division has placed online a report listing, by county, the number of concealed handgun permits issued during the period 1990-2003. I thought it would be interesting to compare the issue rates by population - so I found some census population estimates by county, and combined the data sets, to get the per capital CHL’s issued in California. Turns out there’s some pretty big variation - between 3.5 percent of the population (Modoc County, for example) to .0013 percent (San Francisco County).

The five counties with the most CHL’s per capita were:

Modoc 3.5893%
Sierra 3.3409%
Trinity 3.1167%
Alpine 2.8950%
Amador 2.2939%

The five counties with the fewest CHL’s per capita were:

San Francisco .0013%
Santa Clara .0112%
Alameda .0139%
Los Angeles .0141%
Santa Cruz .0175%

Here are the county-by-county numbers for 2003, in descending order by ratio of CHL’s to residents. Also, here’s the data as a CSV file if you want to look at it yourself.