At 08:31 PM 5/4/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
Not being prepared to risk imprisonment for tax evasion, and being desirous of living in the United States rather than on a coral atoll, I answer the questions that Macintax asks me, gulp when I see the final figure, and write out a check (which I then have to sell even more stock to cover...perpetuating the cycle).
--Tim May
The Transaction Records Clearinghouse has expanded their site on actual IRS criminal prosecutions into a neat table (for 1994) which shows: odds of referral (per million pop) 17 odds of conviction (per million pop) 8 odds of prison (per million pop) 4 # of referrals for prosecution 4,542 # convicted after prosecution 1,991 # sentenced to prison terms 957 population of federal district 260,340,990 http://www.trac.syr.edu/tracirs/analysis/IRS017tab.html For comparison, the annual risk of being murdered is about 80 per million (8 per 100,000). In addition, only 40% of the above refferals are for ordinary tax fraud and evasion. Sixty percent are for drug and money laundering kinds of offenses. Even though the population of those who regularly violate federal tax laws is smaller (20 million?) the records show that even for this population the odds of being convicted are approximately the odds of being nurdered. http://www.trac.syr.edu/tracirs/analysis/IRS019page.html Shows that the *median* prison sentence and *median* fine after conviction is Zero in both cases. DCF