The Great American Tax Dilemma by Jerome Tuccille

The Great American Tax Dilemma by Jerome Tuccille:

"The media has recently been filled with reports of taxpayer identify theft run amok. According to a Yahoo Finance story, the instances of American taxpayers having their identities ripped off by enterprising thieves, who then file tax returns in the victims’ names using their social security numbers and collect refunds for themselves, is up fivefold in the past two years.

The crisis is now approaching epidemic proportions.

It’s bad enough that our modern-day Caesars have devised a tax system that violates the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights.

By forcing Americans to bare the intimate details of their financial lives every April 15th, the U.S. government is in direct violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the very spirit upon which this Republic was founded. As if that weren’t bad enough, it now turns out that every scrap of information that defines who we are – birthdates, social security numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, income, expenses, stock and bond purchases and sales, property owned and taxes paid on it, we have hardly scratched the surface here – is available to every hacker and criminal with the ability to penetrate IRS’s Maginot line of security.

Not only are we forced to comply with this monstrous system, we are compelled to do so under pain of fines, imprisonment"