Peter Hendrickson is a convicted felon and long-time
promoter of a variety of tax protestor schemes. In his book Cracking the Code
he claims to “prove” that the income tax only applies to people who are
employed by foreign corporations or the federal government,
and provides a step-by-step method for falsifying amended tax returns to get
post-hoc tax rebates from previous years of income tax payment. He also runs
the website Lost Horizons where people who have fallen for his scam discuss how
to avoid paying taxes and how to avoid jail time and fines after the IRS has
caught them avoiding paying taxes. The courts have not been very sympathetic to
Hendrickson’s arguments, nor the arguments promoted by the people posting on
his forums.
He is also a convicted domestic terrorist. In 1990
Hendrickson and his gang conspired to place a fire bomb in the mail, plannet to
coincide with the due date for yearly income tax returns. The bomb exploded and
injured a postal worker as well as a bystander.
Hendrickson did get off relatively easy for that one due to his willingness to
give up his fellow conspirators. In 2008,
however, he was indicted on 10 counts of filing false documents with the IRS.
Diagnosis: Few people can be said to be responsible for more
total time spent in prison than Hendrickson. He is, of course, stark raving
mad, and so are everyone who listens to him, but his long-lasting impact is
presumably limited (although his ideas will probably be reinvented again and
again).
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