Las Vegans protest paying income taxes on tax filing day

Tuesday, April 16, 2002 | 9:25 a.m.

Bearing signs saying "Show Us The Law" and "Please Don't Feed the Vultures," the group was led by Las Vegas tax resister Irwin Schiff, a self-described constitutionalist, tax educator and author of numerous anti-income tax books including his latest, "Federal Mafia: How It Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes."

"We're being ripped off," Schiff said on the steps of the federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas.

"The government doesn't collect income tax, it extorts it."

The 74-year-old Schiff lost his most recent legal battle involving the Internal Revenue Service when a Clark County District Court judge last month dismissed his civil lawsuit against Bank of America. In the lawsuit, Schiff contended the bank acted improperly when it turned over funds in his account to the IRS.

The judge, however, ruled that it was not up to his court to decide whether the IRS or its procedures are constitutional.

Schiff, who graduated in 1950 from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor's degree in economics and accounting, insist that the federal government cannot tax its citizens to pay the country's debts.

Schiff claims that the federal income tax doesn't fall under the taxes outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

"We're not protesting, we're just calling attention to this," he said.

Schiff, who moved to Las Vegas in 1994, said he was arrested and convicted on tax evasion charges in the 1980s for not filing income taxes.

"I went to jail for four years and was on probation for four years from 1986 through 1994," he said.

Toni Mitchell, a 29-year-old food server at the Monte Carlo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip, has not paid income tax, or paid very little, since 1996.

Mitchell said she joined the protest along with her bulldog Emeril, who was wearing a T-shirt bearing the words "Tax Freedom ... Irwin Schiff," to educate the public.

"Americans are uninformed about paying income tax," she said.

Nevertheless, it was estimated 132 million individual tax returns would be submitted this tax season worth about $994 billion in government revenue.

Edward McKeown was not among them. The 30-year-old Popeye's Chicken restaurant manager said he did his homework before filing a zero-status claim.

"I researched it," McKeown said. "There's no law stating that everyone has to pay. All the information (he learned from Schiff) is verifiable."