Canada Customs/Revenue Agency - formerly known as Revenue Canada
Until he was effectively driven out by the repetitive blatherings of the raving nutcases, he was one of the most valuable denizens of the newsgroup can.taxes
He is probably better known as the editor, for Carswell, of the Practitioner's Income Tax Act, a widely used combination of the Canadian Income Tax Act along with extensive notes, as well as the Practitioner's Goods And Service Tax Notes, Annotated, which provides a similar analysis of GST law.
Canadian Tax Consulting/Education group
Fraser Institute: Calculate your Personal Tax Freedom Day here!
Apparently by an ex-CCRA employee, with some descriptions of internal policies. Depending on (indeterminate) its accuracy, it might or might not be helpful to someone trying to tiptoe around CCRA.
A shareware Canadian tax preparation system. Requires Microsoft .NET application framework...
Free of charge, prepares returns for all provinces other than Quebec.
The ever-friendly web site of the United States Department of the Treasury...
For US Purposes...
They offer free tax software for people filing short form tax returns (1040A or EZ), charging if you want to "efile". They use a web-based front end, and apparently use free software like Linux and PHP on the back end of their applications.
NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) TAXSIM Version 4.0 Home Page
Submit tax numbers for some year and their FORTRAN program estimates the tax bill.
This is mostly about Canada/US tax situations, which was of particular interest to me as a Canadian citizen who resided in the USA.
There are an assortment of scam artists out there, ready to tell you the news that you would love to hear, namely that you don't have to pay taxes anymore. There is something of a "lecture circuit," where these folks go out on tour, evangelizing whomever they find with an anti-government, often rather racist, message. You are encouraged to give donations for the "valuable services" they have rendered you.
All sorts of excuses are used; the Canadian ones being almost entirely derivative of American ones; you are assortedly not required to pay taxes because:
Fringes on courtroom flags "prove" their illegitimacy;
It's all a conspiracy of "international bankers" (which typically seems a codeword for "Jews");
Only "humans" have to pay taxes, and that word comes from "hue mans," or "black people," thus establishing that only slaves pay taxes (and that people with black skin are supposed to be slaves);
Alternatively, they may assert that only "persons" have to pay taxes, and go through convoluted explanations such as OUTLAWS LEGAL SERVICE - Definition of " Person" that play the game that somehow only those " entities" defined by certain state-recognized contracts are actually "persons".
This requires highly selective misreadings of old dictionary definitions of "person". The usual claim is that you get tricked into setting up a contract with the government by getting a driver's license, marriage license, or some such thing;
Passive-aggressive misreadings of dictionaries to claim that "freemen" do not have to obey laws that they don't like, apparently often trying to maximize confusion between the terms "freemen" and "free men," as well as trying to confuse listeners over distinctions between this and "nobility" (which was mostly what the Magna Carta was talking about, as a treaty between the King of England and the Barons);
Some US constitutional amendment that was never ratified establishes the illegitimacy of the whole United States government.
Long flame wars have ensued over this, which is particularly silly in Canadian fora.
Since the US District of Columbia was, at one point, "incorporated," from then on, only people who are citizens of DC have to pay taxes.
Again, this seems hardly relevant to Canadian taxation, but it certainly gets brought up, relevant or not...
Scratch any further, and the "boil" tends to "erupt," exposing assorted antisemitism, racism, and such. Some claim "Christian" roots, but obscenity just boils out of them. Anyone that would disagree with apparently must simultaneously be:
A Jew,
A Communist,
A Nazi,
Stupid,
Dishonest,
And the list goes on, tying to whatever conspiracy theory is their favorite this week. Some seem to be primarily scam artists; others are downright Net Kooks, for which the only answer appears to be the passive aggressive solution.
What is amusing is when they imagine that the 9/11 disaster was some sort of US government conspiracy. Consider that the US government was assortedly incompetent to keep secret such matters as:
The Lewinsky mess;
Sandinesta Contra funding;
The Watergate burglary.
In view of that, it requires stunning gullibility to think that an organization that couldn't hide dozens of relatively minor scandals suddenly achieved the adeptness to murder several thousand Americans in public view, hide it from view, and conclude that the benefits of this would outweigh the staggering costs should they be found out.
What's quite amusing is when these folk pull out some reference to some " Top Secret" document that someone published out on the web that supports their theory that there is some government " New World Order" conspiracy. It is impossible to prove that some " Top Secret" thing is directly false; if the conspiracy is real, then government officials would obviously lie about this.
But step back to the issue of whether the " Top Secret" document could possibly have any credibility. Consider the options:
If the document were true, and the " Top Secret" status real, then whomever released would have committed a criminal act that would lead to them being locked up under some form of " Official Secrets Act", along with whomever received the document.
Thus, if it's really " Top Secret", the people involved with disseminating it would be locked up, and that ought to include whomever is telling you that this was a " secret document."
If such a document is credible, then there ought to have been arrests made as a result of its release. That has happened in Canada on occasion when Federal budgets have been leaked.
Alternatively, the document may be a complete fabrication by a " conspiracy nut".
There seems to be a high propensity for the "conspiracy nuts" to gullibly believe anything that goes along with their conspiracy.
You may not be inclined to believe everything former US president Bill Clinton says; I see little reason to, on the other hand, instantly believe wild claims made on the " Net of a Million Lies " by people that may not even be identifiable.
In any case, there are quite a few " tax nuts" out there, and you should consider very carefully what bits of what they say you will believe, and what bits are best left alone...
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
A quite spectacularly antisemitic document fabricated in the 19th century to justify pogroms in Russia, this document is fairly commonly claimed as evidence of all sorts of Jewish evils. Eldon Warman cites it quite a lot...
Then there are the "anti-looney" sites...
Homegrown paranoia - Alberta conspiracy theorists challenge traffic tickets and the Constitution
Eldon Warman's appeal against one of his convictions; dismissed by the court.
Bob Sommers' The Tax Protestor Movement: Proof that P.T. Barnum was Right
Quatloos! Hiding-Money-Offshore Theory
Someone comes to you proposing that you move your money to an offshore account somewhere, so that it can become exempt from taxation. This is an interesting theory, as it goes. If you transfer your $1M in savings to the Bahamas, it might earn $100K a year, and if you lie to the tax authorities, you could evade paying taxes on that income. But there are several problems with this scheme:
You have to have a good chunk of money to move offshore for this to be worth anything. It's no fabulous tax shelter to hide $250 in interest on your bank account.
If you don't have $500,000 in cash sitting around, there's not all that much point to the exercise. After all, banking in tropical countries doesn't come for free. They know you're a "rich foreigner", and will charge you "rich foreigner" prices.
It is tax fraud, and while you will probably not get caught instantly, or even vaguely quickly, if you do get caught, things will get pretty ugly.
Sometimes the "tax guys" may be fairly inept; everyone doubtless has a story of that. But it's not universal, and they can eventually notice.
A typical scenario is in the US, where you are required to disclose large foreign accounts on a form called a [TD F 90-22.1]. If you are regularly transferring large amounts of money out of the US, that is detected, and if no disclosure form is filed, you can, to a great extent, count on getting audited or getting held up at Customs when entering the US.
You have sent your money to some little bank in the Bahamas.
The bank walks away with your money.
It may even be legal for them to do so. If you had to legally declare that it wasn't your money anymore in order to get the IRS or CCRA off your back, then there's a good legal argument that it is their money to walk away with.
Who do you call? If you go to the local authorities, you have to reveal your tax evasion activities, and perhaps even admit that you filed dishonest transfer documents, with a whole ugly assortment of ways in which you may be considered a "criminal."
Quietly pursuing the thieving bankers under Bahamian (or whatever country's) law without your money when the bankers have your money to spend on their defense activities is not going to be a pretty situation either. Especially if you aren't intimate with their legal systems, and assume that it's basically like what you see on TV on COPS.
Then there's the rich in irony scenario.
The thieving bankers put on their thinking caps and decide to fight back. They threaten to reveal the tax evasion to the authorities you were trying to hide your money from, and demand that you give them even more money.
Joy.
People have made up their own fictitious countries to do this sort of thing; see the Government of the Dominion of Melchizedek
Idiot Legal Arguments: A Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments
There are sometimes some rather peculiar views on what Texas would be allowed to do; some think there is some special right Texas has to "secede" from the United States. Better to consult some real references on this:
Those that wish that there were useful discussions on can.taxes should surely consult the passive aggressive solution.