Discussion in this subthread veered off into several various subsubthreads, some of which involve the legal issue where the law requires taxpayers to take an action which looks to me like perjury, and some of which involve underlying issues such as how did I know that a W-2 was fake or how sure could I be that an estimate wasn't the true and correct value to the best of my knowledge and belief.
One poster asserted as follows.
I asked: The post of WHAT? After all, the law that requires the signer to sign under penalty of perjury a prescribed statement saying that to the best of the signer's knowledge and belief the attachments are true and correct, even when the signer knows (and/or believes) that the attachments are false and incorrect, DOES force taxpayers to sign the return with something they believe to be false on it.
One or two posters raised the point that an examiner might not be deceived by the false declaration of a taxpayer, because the examiner knows that the law requires the taxpayer to sign the prescribed declaration even though the taxpayer knows it is false. I see the point that this might render the signing non-perjurious, even though the statement says "under penalty of perjury." This is an odd form of escape though. It certainly isn't obvious to a taxpayer who has heard the word "perjury" before, who wishes not to sign a known false declaration, but who has not yet been informed that the law requires signing the known false declaration anyway.
Some posters raised the point of intent. Before being informed of the legal requirement, I intentionally wrote and signed honest statements, for which I am penalized. After being informed of the legal requirement, I signed known false declarations, and was not further penalized. My signing of known false declarations was committed under coercion. But if I had signed the same known false declarations before being informed of the legal requirement, my signing would have been intentional, would not have been due to coercion, and would have been done without being aware that an examiner would not be deceived. It remains non-obvious to me how such an act of signing could be considered not to be perjury.
When I received a false W-2, I knew it was false. One poster pointed me to form 4852. Here is the version that existed at the time:
One or two posters said that the law does not require the impossible. However, sometimes it did. Sometimes in the 1970's I was required to take negative numbers and divide them by zero. A tax assister said that I should divide zero by zero instead, which would yield 0 in that case (my posting in misc.legal.moderated mistakenly said 1 instead of
0, but I correct it here). The rules did not permit that substitution. In later years the rules were changed.Where an estimate is an estimate, the law doesn't require the impossible, it doesn't force me to know the true and correct numbers, the law just forces me to sign under penalty of perjury a declarati> I think you misunderstand the meaning of "frivolous" return _as used by > the IRS_.
I think not. Even though there are no court rulings yet on whether my failures to commit perjury were frivolous or not, the meaning _as used by the IRS_ does include writing and signing honest declarations instead of signing under penalty of perjury a statement which is known to be false.
Frivolousness does include cases like that, no doubt. But it's not limited to those cases. The IRS told me, maybe four years too late or maybe nearly thirty years too late, that if I declare and sign under penalty of perjury facts which are different from the legally required declaration (that all attachments are true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief) then it's automatically considered frivolous.
Wrong. If that were true, the IRS would have stopped bugging me, though five years late, when they finally revealed what number they had thought was fraudulent. But they did not stop. My cases are in Tax Court and Court of Federal Claims because the IRS considers failure to perjure to be frivolous.
Well sure, I know NOW that I was supposed to sign the known false declaration even though it was perjury. I also know that I was supposed to sign the known false declaration even when I knew that an attached W-2 was fraudulent. But I didn't know it when I needed to know it. I foolishly wrote the truth, and the IRS calls that frivolous.
Getting back to what Barry Gold wrote earlier:
Hands down, US law requires taxpayers to sign statements which have those elements of perjury.
It still seems to me that if a taxpayer doesn't know that the law requires the taxpayer to commit elements 1 and 2, then the taxpayer doesn't know that a false declaration will avoid deceiving the examiner because the taxpayer doesn't know that the examiner knows that the law requires the taxpayer to commit elements 1 and 2.
When the taxpayer does not know about the coercion, how does the false declaration become something other than perjury?
And how does a taxpayer, one who otherwise had foolish inclinations to be honest, discover that the law requires signing the false declaration? Penalties for frivolousness eventually gave me the answer, years late. But what is the correct method by which a taxpayer should learn that?