Audit Update: IRS Wants to Confiscate Your Passport

New Tax Laws Crafted in Quiet and Now Pending in Congress

In a bit of inane demands from the IRS, the IRS wants to be able to revoke your passport without a hearing in federal court, U.S. Tax Court, or any court as a new tool for its audit process. That's under new tax laws crafted in quiet in Congress.

See the text of the bill here, in section40304.http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s1813/text

Whoever heard of this kind of tax penalty? How can they deny you, an American citizen, your right to travel across borders because the IRS says you owe them money? Freedom to travel is foundational to our American legal and political heritage as a means to enforce free speech. An American’s freedom to travel puts the Berlin Wall regimes both past and present to shame.

Leave it to the IRS to make avoiding taxes (an American pastime) such a bad act they now want to deprive you of your freedom of travel. Aren’t the tax code and tax laws bizarre enough already, without passport revocations to boot? Will you have to file a tax court petition to get your passport back?

Freedom to travel is foundational to our American legal and political heritage as a means to enforce free speech.

What we really need is to require IRS agents to obtain a special passport anytime they leave their offices. Let’s make the Internal Revenue Service truly internal to itself, rather than find new means of increasing the harm from the chances of an audit or getting audited and harassing Americans for exercising their truest freedoms.