‘If I avoid and evade; I’ll go to jail’

By Alex P. Vidal

“The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.”—Denis Healey

IF a son or daughter is charged with tax evasion in the United Sates but is (still) hiding in the Philippines, no amount of parental protection can save him or her.

The accused may roll past the charges of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars committed against private individuals or corporations and institutions if he or she has a very good lawyer, but in tax evasion, or the act of not paying taxes that are owed, he or she can never get away with murder.

The laws in the Philippines and in the United States are different when it comes to running after tax cheats. If you have a political padrino in the higher echelon of government, a Pinoy tax evader can wiggle out from the mess.

There is no such animal in the United States. Even the mighty and the powerful will go to jail. No exemptions. Tax evasion and fraud is illegal and intentional misrepresentation of tax obligations.

It can involve deliberate omission or falsification of income or revenue, as well as efforts to be invisible to tax authorities altogether.

This results in the reduction of income that lawfully belongs to the government, and to the people.

Tax evasion and tax fraud not only cheats the public of revenue that is to be used for public goods, but also puts compliant taxpayers that obey the law at a disadvantage.

It makes it harder for those compliant businesses to be profitable when they are competing with businesses that do not bear the expense of paying their fair share of taxes.

Tax evasion can be deliberate or inadvertent and is distinct from tax avoidance, according to William G. Gale and Aaron Krupkin of Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Deliberate evasion occurs when, for example, individuals do not report income or do not pay taxes.

But unintentional mistakes made in filing tax returns can also give rise to inadvertent tax evasion. Illegal tax evasion is distinct from tax avoidance, which is taking advantage of legal ways to reduce tax liability, such as using the mortgage interest deduction.

However, due to ambiguities in the law, differences in interpretations, the creation of new circumstances, and other factors, there can be some gray areas where it is difficult to distinguish between avoidance and evasion, explained Gale and Krupkin.

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NOBODY had expected the recent super-typhoon “Paeng” to wreck havoc in such horrific scale since it started with a rain—heavy rain—before it became a king-sized monster and its mayhem was felt nationwide.

Was it a “punishment” from God?

Or was it a pre-destined human suffering?

Or a “revenge” of nature?

If we believe in the religious philosophy of deism, we will throw away the doctrine of theism; and we will cast aside pantheism.

The deists would never believe that God had something to do with “Yolanda” in 2013, “Ruby” in 2014, and other deadly “wrath of nature” and other catastrophes in the past and in the future.

They believe that God exists, and that His glory is manifested in the heavens and the earth, but that He does not participate in any way in the events which happen in that universe.

The deist conception of God is that he is a great clock maker, who created the cosmos and stands outside watching the events that unfold within it.

The theists, on the other hand, hold that God is present to the world, yet separate from it; thus if He is a murderous God, He could be blamed for the “Yolanda” and “Ruby” mayhem “to teach us a lesson” for being sinners.

The pantheists believe that God is manifested in nature and, in fact, identical to nature.

Since man has been cruel and irresponsible in dealing with his environment and nature since time immemorial, did God bring the calamities as an act of “revenge”?

From the point of view of Christian precepts, the above-stated arguments seem illogical because God essentially sums up the meaning of love.

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Since the theological concept of God is that of having the attributes of omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence, God can never be cruel, murderous, vengeful or destructive.

But Yahweh, the God in the Old Testament, was sadistic and cruel who killed 2,821,364 people, mostly Philistines, using biblical numbers, according to Dwindling In Belief.

Yahweh reportedly killed an estimated 25 million people, added the Dwindling In Belief, an unbeliever’s thoughts about the Bible, Quran, and Book of Mormon.

“I kill … I wound … I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and mine sword shall devour flesh.” (Deuteronomy 32:39-42)

In the Flood of Noah, an estimated 20,000,000 were killed (reference: Genesis 7:23)

For more on the number of those killed by God, please read Steve Wells’ book Drunk With Blood, where he documented “God’s killings in the Bible.”

So why did “Yolanda”, “Ruby” and other calamities happen?

Either God wanted to stop them but He did not, or God wanted to stop them but He could not.

This was the same view made by Voltaire, a rationalist, when he criticized Jean-Jacque Rousseau, a romanticist, in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake that killed thousands of people in 1755.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)