Barry Durmaz, a writer from Pennsylvania, claims to be living a free life having not paid income taxes in 17 years. The author also recently stopped licensing his vehicle.
Durmaz told The Epoch Times in an interview that he had a custom license plate made for his car that says “Private, DOT exempt, for non-commercial use only.”
The Pennsylvania citizen says he is a person of liberty and does not consent to disclose personal information to the government or file forms for taxes and licensing.
“We don’t see the IRS in the Constitution,” Durmaz said in the interview. “When Congress is ready to send a bill to me or to whomever, we ought to pay it. But we never received one. It’s good to make a distinction between what taxing authority is in the Constitution, versus this organization, the IRS, that terrorizes people if they don’t fill out these forms.”
Durmaz says he doesn’t recognize the authority of the Internal Revenue Service because he doesn’t consider it constitutional. The husband and father is now publishing his first book, “What Is An American: How the Virtuous Government of America’s Unseen King Deals a Death Blow to the Evils of Socialism, Marxism, and Communism.”
Durmaz said he considered the Bible’s commandment stating, “Thou must not steal” when he was deducting taxes from employee paychecks prior to his resolution.
He said he believed he was robbing his workers and although he had a contract to pay maybe $12 per hour, after taxes, that is not what they made. The arrangements he had with his employees had nothing to do with the government. He was in the same position as the IRS in terms of tax collection.
Durmaz gave the purpose of income tax a lot of thought before he stopped paying it, studying the tax forms available at public offices: “Nobody is telling me to take those. There is no threat.”
“Of course, there are threats out there, but when it comes down to it, I had to choose to pick up those forms and fill them out,” the author said, before going to clarify that for years, he did just that, sometimes preparing taxes on his own and at other times paying for tax preparation.
Durmaz credits staying off the IRS radar to a trip he took to Japan. His wife is Japanese and he moved to Japan for what he believed would be a decade and filed forms reflecting that intention, but his family moved back three years later. That was 17 years ago and he hasn’t paid income taxes since then.