"The preservation of a free government requires, not merely that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained, but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great barrier which defends the rights of the people. The rulers who are guilty of such encroachment exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are TYRANTS. The people who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them and are slaves….."

-James Madison

 

The Feds Finally Concede Every CtC-Relevant Fact About "Form 4852"

The Treasury Department finally abandons its effort to suggest to the gullible that "Form 4852" is only for use by "taxpayers" and that "withholding" can only be done from "wages"

EVEN WHILE MAKING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF GOVERNMENT ADMISSIONS TO THE CONTRARY in response to CtC-educated filings over more than ten years now, and even through repeated form revisions over that period, the US Treasury Department persisted in accompanying its "Form 4852 [substitute for incorrect or missing Forms W-2 or 1099-R]" with language suggesting that the form could only be used by "taxpayers", and that to use the form, or to report withheld amounts, was to declare (or agree) that "taxable income" had been paid. At long last, this misleading language has been withdrawn and replaced, in a tacit admission of the truth about both matters.

The faulty and misleading language had never appeared in the actual declaratory content of the form, of course. Instead, both false ideas were conveyed by inviting assumptions from phrasing in the "instructions" published with the form.

For instance, the "Purpose of Form" instruction accompanying prior versions declared that, "Form 4852 is completed by taxpayers or their representatives..." The casual reader was thereby invited to assume an "only" in that declaration, even though none actually appears.

Also carefully kept out of the form's declaratory content, and thus never crossing the line into directly implying that adverse inferences attend the use of the form as a legal matter while still being predictably misleading, language in the "Line-by-line" portion of the previous versions' instructions read, "Line 4. Enter the year the taxpayer had taxable income from which Federal taxes were withheld..."

In addition to appearing merely in the instructions and plainly reflecting self-serving assumptions about who would be using 4852s (in harmony with the revenue-hungry state's default position that any given economic activity is of the taxable variety unless and until declared otherwise by the actor), neither of these misleading expressions were definitive or pre-emptive. As noted above, there was no "only" in this language.

But at the same time, the retention of this misleading wording even after a growing number of Americans began using 4852s to rebut allegations of the receipt of "income", and despite several revisions of the form-- including revisions of the instructions-- each plainly in direct response to this new application of the form, was unquestionably a deliberate effort to corruptly encourage uncertainties and anxieties about this use of the form. Happily, some honest individual or group at the Treasury Department couldn't stomach the deception any longer, and a few months ago, the 4852 was revised yet again, this time with the misleading language removed.

(It's possible that honesty had nothing to do with this new, improved revision... Perhaps the change occurred due to virtuous push-back by CtC warriors.

No one has ever faced an assertion that 4852s couldn't properly be used as the CtC-educated use them. But some have had occasion to debunk a ridiculous assertion that amounts can only be withheld from "income" payments, and that therefore declaring that amounts have been withheld is to declare that "income" has been paid, made by an IRS or DOJ hack floundering about for an adverse argument in a legal contest. See some discussion of this subject here.

This latter "argument" is so patently untenable and embarrassing even just to read or hear-- and so readily debunked by simply inserting a big red "properly" into it, as, "amounts can only properly be withheld from "income" payments..."-- that someone in a position of authority may well have commanded that it be abandoned. After all, to trot out such a desperate argument, or even just to allow it to be suggested by the 4852 instruction language, is to more overtly admit to having no argument against a CtC-educated claimant than to simply say nothing...)

SO, LET'S LOOK AT HOW THE 4852 WAS BEFORE CtC and how it was changed in several revisions intended to discourage the educated CtC community (even while its members' claims continued to be routinely honored). Then we'll look at what it has now become in a tacit admission of the CtC-revealed truths the state still finds hugely inconvenient to its unbridled ambitions but no longer dares to deny in this fashion.

At the time of CtC's first edition in 2003 the 1998 version of the form was the current version. Page 1 of that form-- the only page at which anyone HAD to look, since it's the one with all the "action" elements-- presented nothing at all capable of affecting one's view of the form's utility. Here is the bottom portion of that page, where we find the only text on the page which is not part of one of the fields to be completed:

 

On page 2 of the form we find the old portions of text which are the subject of our discussion, and which were, pre-CtC, not unreasonable in their inclusion. After all, pre-CtC, it is likely that the form would never have been used other than by someone who believed both expressions to be apt and unremarkable:

At the end of 2005, after the IRS had begun to be inundated with CtC-educated filings as word of the liberating truth about the tax spread, Form 4852 was revised. The "Paperwork Reduction Act" notice was shouldered off page 1 by the misleading "Purpose of Form" language (and some additional somewhat-discouraging-appearing material brand new for this revision). This change was plainly intended to deceive and discourage the growing army of newly awakened and upright ex-coppertops:

At the same, time, a slight change was made in the "Line 4" instruction which remained on page 2 ("the taxpayer" is replaced by "you"):

By early 2007, CtC-educated claimants were recovering all their money in ever-greater numbers. This was both for the simple reason that the liberating truth about the tax continued to rapidly spread, and because in April of 2006, the government had launched a new, transparently corrupt effort to discourage that spread which predictably backfired due to its particulars constituting unmistakable evidence of both the accuracy of CtC's information and the importance of that information being acted upon by every grown-up American with a smidgen of common-sense and love of country.

Still in its reflexive stonewall mode, the government rolled out another revision of Form 4852, retaining the misleading "Purpose of form" language on page 1 and adding penalty warnings which had never appeared anywhere on the form or its instructions in the past:

Page 2 of the form was essentially unchanged other than as necessary to account for the fact that some line numbers on the form had been changed. The misleading "line 4" language remained the same.

The return of improperly-withheld and -paid-in amounts by the federal and, by then, 33 state tax agencies and treasury departments ratcheted up during the subsequent several years. Within a year of this 2007 revision just the tiny fraction of these refunds generously furnished to me for posting and sharing with the world had reached a pace averaging $83,000.00 per month.

However, rather than just face the facts like a man and reconcile itself to the unchallengeable legal reality it was quietly acknowledging with every refund check, the government doubled-down, as is its reflex. In late 2008, after years of internal proposals to try to charge me with something in order to frighten people away from CtC-- each of which was declined by the IRS's own  "criminal division"-- and despite its failure to secure a real grand jury indictment, the DOJ "tax division" in Washington produced an unsigned "indictment" charging me with not really believing that my earnings don't qualify as "wages" (under a special tax-law "perjury" provision). A suitably manipulated show-trial followed a year later, resulting in a foreordained conviction.

As with the similarly-bogus, similarly truth-emphasizing "civil lawsuit" attack, this criminal assault just galvanized truth-fueled, truth-spreading American men and women. Even after I checked in at a federal prison, refunds based on what I was charged with not believing to be true continued to be demanded, and continued to issue forth, week after week.

Again desperate to frighten the people away from the inescapable, but oh, so inconvenient truth, the feds cranked out yet another revision of Form 4852 in late 2010. (It's worth noting at this point that prior to 1998, Form 4852 had not had a single revision of any of the varieties discussed here in all its prior 24 year history. A number of forms had been issued during those years--see here, here, here, here, here and here-- but the changes in all these cases simply involved some tweaking of the formatting, responses to the OMB-numbering requirements introduced in the 1980s, and the addition of pension-return applications.)

The 2010 revision again retained on page 1 the misleading, misstated "Purpose of form" language and kept the beginning of the threatening "penalty" section front-and-center. New was a chunk of actual gibberish, apparently added by a bureaucracy in such a lather to order the tide to recede that either no time was spent proof-reading the work or the level of desperation had reached the point at which resort was being made to sheer confusion. Look at the second highlighted paragraph (below the "Purpose of form" language, which remained as it had been in prior versions):

Enjoy this. ON THE FORM 4852 IN YOUR HAND you are advised to contact the IRS so that... it can send you a Form 4852...? Somehow, I suspect that if a CtC-educated person were to climb through this looking-glass and get an IRS agent on the phone what he or she would receive would be nothing helpful. But I'm a cynic by nature (well, by experience, really). I'd love to see clarifying comments from any warrior who gave this a shot.

Anyway, this gibberish was the sole addition and apparent reason for the 2010 revision. The material on page 2, the "Line 4: Enter the year you received taxable income from which federal income taxes were withheld" included, remained virtually identical to the corresponding instructions on the page 2 accompanying the 2007 form:

 

SO, QUITE A LITTLE CAMPAIGN TO DISCOURAGE, INTIMIDATE AND CONFUSE educated Americans from successfully making their inconvenient rebuttals and reclamations over the first ten years since CtC first revealed the liberating truth in 2003!

FINALLY, though, someone has found him-or-herself obliged to excise the overt, egregiously-misleading "Purpose of form" and "Line 4" language previously clung-to on these forms over all those years and through all those revisions.

 Finally, the effort to falsely imply that the Form 4852 is only for use by "taxpayers" (and to falsely imply that use of the form supports a presumption of self-endorsed "taxpayer" status) has been abandoned.

 Finally, the effort to falsely imply that "withholding" can, as if by a law of nature, only be applied to "taxable income" (and to falsely imply that reporting amounts withheld implies an agreement that what they were withheld from was "taxable income", whether the "wages" variety or any other) has been abandoned.

That long-standing misleading language has FINALLY been replaced with new expressions acknowledging that NON-"taxpayers" also can and do use these forms, and that reporting amounts withheld says nothing whatever about the propriety of that withholding, or the legal character of what it was withheld from.

Five months ago, the Department of the Treasury replaced previous versions of Form 4852 with its new, much-improved model, acknowledging every CtC--thing about these forms. Here is page 1, with the new, straightforward "Purpose of form" language:

Here is page 2 of the new form, with the new, no-longer-flogging-the idiotic-withholding-argument "Line 4" language:

It's about time.

 

NOTES: Bigtime Hat-Tip to CtC Warrior Tyler Harwood for noticing the changed 2013 form and alerting me!!

Also, you will have noted that the IRS has now posted a special webpage for form 4852, as noted in the paragraph on the page 1 excerpt above, just before the highlighted "Purpose of form" paragraph. Interestingly, one will find on that webpage a special note below the form title (which itself says plainly what the form is for) purporting to explain what the form is for, by way of the "is completed by taxpayers or their representatives when..." language which has been carefully removed from the form itself.

This ham-handed effort to keep the old nonsense somehow in play, if only in this plainly-tissue-thin pretense, is amusing. It also simply emphasizes the fact that this old language is NOT the "officially-approved" language, and that the actual "officially-approved" language specifically eschews wording like this, which could be mistaken as suggesting the form is only to be used by "taxpayers"...

Considering this little ploy along with the more dramatic fraud discussed here, I begin to suspect that the tax agency has been granted some latitude to treat its website like an accountability-free carnival fun house "Hall of Smoke and Mirrors". I guess the watch-word when surfing irs.gov should be "caveat emptor"...

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