Can the IRS take your passport away?

The IRS can now take away your passport.

A little-noticed provision in the highway funding bill Congress passed this week threatens a right most Americans take for granted: the right to travel abroad. The provision in question gives the Internal Revenue Service the authority to revoke the passport of anyone the IRS claims owes more than $50,000 in back taxes.

Congress is giving the IRS this new power because a decline in gas tax receipts has bankrupted the federal highway trust fund. Of course, Congress would rather squeeze more money from the American people than reduce spending, repeal costly regulations, or return responsibility for highway construction to the states, local governments, and the private sector. On the other hand, most in Congress fear the political consequences of raising gas, or other, taxes. Giving the IRS new powers allows politicians to increase government revenue without having to increase tax rates. Some even brag about how they are “cracking down on tax cheats.”

If you think this is nothing to worry about then you are not paying attention. The IRS can and does routinely fabricate/estimate tax liabilities prior to auditing someone for a variety of reasons. Usually it involves some kind of missed filing or missing documentation. But the IRS is now a highly politicized organization that has been used to attack political opponents. This measure will make it even easier. The IRS can simply “estimate” that you owe more than $50,000 and you will not allowed to leave the country. Beware. You need a second passport more than ever if you plan on staying in the USA.

read more:  Ron Paul: Will The IRS Take Your Passport? – OpEd

About fafc

The goal of the “Find a Free Country Project” is to research, explore and find a safe and secure free country outside the USA, that is not too large, has a relatively open immigration policy, has a friendly business climate, has a non-intrusive government committed to freedom, and then move to it.
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17 Responses to Can the IRS take your passport away?

  1. Croatian Capitalist says:

    To paraphrase Hussein Obama: Yes, they can!

    But this really shouldn’t surprise anyone, the American government(s) and it’s various agencies have done pretty much whatever they wanted to since at least 9/11 without consequence (at least to my knowledge).

    • fafc says:

      Freedom is just an illusion in the USA, but the illusion is starting to fail. As such I suspect the measures that the elites use to maintain control are going to get less subtle and more obvious. If people wait until that time, there will be no opportunity fix it, and little opportunity to leave.

  2. Croatian Capitalist says:

    I doubt that the American people will do anything (serious) to fix it, if they let everything else pass without seriously opposing it, I don’t see how an epiphany regarding the status of freedom in the USA would suddenly spur them into serious action, they are well-fed (quantity-wise, not quality-wise), have a million distractions to occupy them (sports, television, gadgets, etc.), their country has the most powerful state apparatus in the World and mostly ultra-leftist media, etc., so I regard the prospect of the USA in it’s current form getting fixed as SF (I mean, the so-called “conservative” Americans aren’t even willing/able to organize something as simple as the boycotting of companies that support things such as illegal immigration), the only thing that could move the American people into action in my opinion is total economic collapse (meaning amongst other things no more food stamps and welfare payments in general), but that would likely mean the end of the USA in it’s current form (I think that “Balkanization” would likely occur in such a scenario).

    • fafc says:

      Have to agree. America is gone. Somehow conservatives have convinced themselves that there is nothing they can do so they have given up. They shrug and do nothing. Perhaps they are right. And I agree that only an economic collapse will change anything, but not necessarily for the better. The government is ready for that. I think they want it. They will use any crisis as an excuse to take even more power, and the conservatives who did nothing when it would have been easy, painless and likely to succeed will do nothing when the cause is utterly hopeless.

  3. Croatian Capitalist says:

    Yes, total economic collapse does come with the risk of even worse government coming along, but considering that the alternative is the country becoming a mix of current day Mexico and Brazil and staying that way for the duration of the existence of the USA, I think that the American people don’t really have much to lose looking at things in the long-run.

    Another reason why many Americans won’t do anything has come to my mind, namely since many people don’t really closely follow news from the rest of the World (and this isn’t limited to Americans), if at all, they see many countries as they were like before, as opposed to what they are like now, so they probably think to themselves something like this: “Oh well, if America does becomes like Mexico or the Soviet Union, I can always move to Australia or New Zealand (or the UK or Ireland or whatever country they think is still like they were like 50 or more years ago socially),”

  4. Croatian Capitalist says:

    Even though I am obviously no fan of an total economic collapse happening, it is still the only realistic potential solution to the major problems of not just the USA, but the Western World in general, because welfare dependency, left-wing media indoctrination, etc. have taken too deep of a root with(in) the average Western person for it to be realistically expected for those policies to be removed by way of the ballot box in the vast majority of Western countries.

    I mean, look at my country for example, the average person here who actually works pays an income tax (and gets little or nothing for it in return) rate several times over what the Medieval serfs here payed (and the Medieval serfs didn’t have to pay the hundreds of indirect taxes that we have to today), then you have hundreds of thousands of people who “work” in the public sector thanks to getting hired by whichever leftist party was in power at the time, so they and their families will always vote for them, the laws are anti-business, the vast majority of people still have a socialist mentality, etc., so I can’t see anything else apart from total economic collapse snapping the people out of it and replacing the socialist mentality of the average person with a mentality of personal responsibility.

  5. Croatian Capitalist says:

    *= The only realistic potential solution that I can see.

  6. Croatian Capitalist says:

    I read a “funny” news story in the Croatian media today, our own version (which usually brutally punishes anyone who makes even the smallest of mistakes) of the IRS was audited, and it was found that they broke Croatian laws by amongst others things procuring supplies illegally, putting incorrect incomes and expenditures, etc., so this is just another reason to add to the list of why Croatia should be avoided as an emigration destination (or in my case, why it should be emigrated from).

    • fafc says:

      But still a nice place to visit!

      • Croatian Capitalist says:

        That is mostly true, apart from in the Slavonia region (which for the most part looks like it is stuck in the 1970’s), it would be hard for someone from the outside who is visiting the country to realise just in how much trouble this country is in.

  7. Croatian Capitalist says:

    Actually, after thinking about it a bit more, I partially take back what I wrote above, there is (if the visitor knows about the history of this region) a fairly simple way to see how much trouble this country is in, namely by looking at the names of the streets, squares, etc., for example the nicest looking square in Zagreb carries the name of Josip Broz Tito, who committed genocide against Croatian, German, Italian, etc. civilians, committed by far the biggest theft of private property this region has ever seen, forced Jews who wanted to leave for Israel to sign documents renouncing their rights to the property that was stolen from them, took about half of Croatia’s territory away from it, split the Croatian nation by forming the “Muslim by nationality” category and “encouraging” Croatian Muslims into it, helped Carlos the Jackal and various German and Palestinian left-wing terrorists, squandered the countless billions Yugoslavia got in reparations from Germany and as “gifts” from the United States, etc., so the fact a genocidal anti-Croatian communist dictator has squares and streets named after him 25 years after we supposedly freed ourselves of communist rule speaks volumes about the mental state of the majority of people in this country.

  8. Croatian Capitalist says:

    I think that this works for other places as well, for example in Tehran the streets are named after left-wing terrorists such as Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Bobby Sands, etc., so that alone is reason enough for me to avoid Iran.

    • fafc says:

      Yes, I don’t plan on going to Iran any time soon. It is a pity. It is a beautiful country.

      • Croatian Capitalist says:

        Yes, it is, there is an incredible amount of things for history enthusiasts to see there, and it should be one of the top countries in the World, but sadly thanks to inadequate (to put it politely) leadership it is nowhere near being the top country even in the Middle East, much less worldwide.

  9. Croatian Capitalist says:
  10. Croatian Capitalist says:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-16/irs-revoke-362000-passports-us-citizens

    The USA is increasingly resembling the Cold War era Eastern Bloc countries, even though the USA’s anti-freedom methods are more devious than those countries’ were.

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