Don't Be Like Wesley Snipes: The Government Is Cracking Down On "Tax Defiers"

Wesley Snipes’ battle with the IRS isn’t over just yet.

The Blade actor may have been acquitted of tax fraud and conspiracy on Feb 1, but he is scheduled to be sentenced on April 24 on three counts of failing to file a tax return.

Since he was found not guilty of the most serious charges against him (he was accused of trying to cheat the government of almost $12 million in false refund claims and not filing returns for six years), the 16 years he could have spent in federal prison is knocked down to three. Snipes stands to face up to one year in prison for each year that he did not file a tax return between 1999 and 2001.

Although he may not be looking forward to any prison sentence, Snipes should be happy that the tax evasion charges are no longer being held against him. On April 8, Nathan Hochman, the Department of Justice’s Tax Divisions’ Assistant Attorney General, announced the creation of the National Tax Defier Initiative which will crack down on those deliberately trying to evade the system.

The initiative defines these ‘tax defiers’ as “those who do not meet their federal tax obligations and seek to transfer those obligations to their neighbor’s back… the tax defier is someone who rejects the legal foundation of the tax system, despite decades of legal precedent upholding the system’s constitutional and statutory validity, and who takes specific and concrete action to violate the law.” This is precisely what Snipes had originally been charged with.