BYU Law Review Volume 2005 | Issue 6 Article 2 12-18-2005 Tax Protestors and Penalties: Ensuring Perceived Fairness and Mitigating Systemic Costs Danshera Cords Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview Part of the Taxation-Federal Commons, and the Tax Law Commons Recommended Citation Danshera Cords, Tax Protestors and Penalties: Ensuring Perceived Fairness and Mitigating Systemic Costs, 2005 BYU L. Rev. 1515 (2005). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2005/iss6/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Brigham Young University Law Review at BYU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Law Review by an authorized editor of BYU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 2CORDS.FIN.DOC 3/14/2006 5:16:09 PM Tax Protestors and Penalties: Ensuring Perceived Fairness and Mitigating Systemic Costs Danshera Cords ∗ “For voluntary self-assessment to be both meaningful and productive of revenues, the citizens must not only have confidence in the fairness of the tax laws, but also in the uniform and vigorous enforcement of these laws.”1 I. INTRODUCTION Each year hundreds of thousands of taxpayers use abusive schemes to avoid paying some or all of their federal income taxes.2 Tax avoidance schemes include abusive tax shelters, fraudulent transactions, and ∗ Associate Professor of Law, Academic Director of Graduate Law Programs, Capital University Law School; LL.M. in Taxation 2000, New York University School of Law; J.D. 1998, Seattle University School of Law; B.A.