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Jewish World Review May 14, 2008 / 9 Iyar 5768 Snitching to the IRS By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir
Most people are reluctant to "snitch" on others, and I think there is a good reason for this. Our democratic system is based on a delicate balance between the freedom of the citizen and the long arm of the law. If freedoms are too extensive and law enforcement hesitant there will be chaos; as the Mishna tells us, "If it were not for the fear of the sovereign, men would eat each other alive." (1) But if law enforcement is too aggressive, then we end up in a police state where freedoms are eroded. For this reason, democratic societies have many built-in safeguards to limit law-enforcement efforts. Among these:
To their credit, the IRS itself does not give much emphasis to informants. The IRS site mentions that "if you suspect or know of" a tax cheat, "you may report this activity" - there is no implication of a civil obligation. Based on figures I found on the internet, informant tips lead to recovered taxes of around 100 million dollars a year - out of total tax revenues of about two trillion dollars. So tipsters bring in something like one dollar out of twenty thousand. (That's .005%.) Let us conjecture that by expanding the program they could multiply this by a factor of ten. Is an additional twentieth of a percent of tax revenue really worth the price of creating a culture of suspicion?
Another consideration is that many tax cheats eventually get caught, so there is a good chance that even without your intervention the tax authorities will eventually get their hands on this person's back taxes.
Jewish law explicitly legitimates reporting someone to the authorities for non-violent crime as a civil duty in cases where their disregard for the law constitutes a substantive danger to the community. (4) In addition, a person may be justified in reporting when he suffers directly from the wrongdoing - for example, if he is being driven out of business because a competitor is evading taxes. My view is that in the absence of either of these considerations, it is best to avoid reporting non-violent crimes like tax evasion to avoid any chilling effect on neighborly relations and communications. A few million dollars of lost tax revenue is a very small price to pay for a culture of openness.
SOURCES: (1) Mishna, Avos 3:2 (2) Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 113a (3) Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 9b. (4) Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Misphat 425:1 in glosses of Rema
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JWR contributor Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir, formerly of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration, is Research Director of the Business Ethics Center of Jerusalem, Jerusalem College of Technology. To comment or pose a question, please click here.
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