When I was in law school I liked to research &quot;tax protestor&quot; and &quot;sovereign citizen&quot; arguments to practice my legal research skills. The IRS documents submitted cover much of what I remember of these people&#x27;s arguments, but not all. Some other arguments or mistakes I recall being common:<p>• Quoting from a court case and claiming it says they do not have to pay tax. The case turns out to be real...but what they are quoting is not from the court&#x27;s ruling but rather is from a brief submitted by the losing side.<p>• Quoting from a court case and claiming it says they do not have to pay tax. The cited court exists, but the case does not.<p>• Similar to the above, but the cited court itself does not exist.<p>• They cite a real case from a real court, but the parts they quote to support their argument do not exist.<p>• On those very rare occasions when they cite a real case, from a real court, and actually quote from the court&#x27;s ruling, it turns out to be a ruling that was overturned quickly by a higher court.<p>• (One of my favorites) Saying that a court lacked jurisdiction because the flag in the courtroom had a gold fringe, which they say signifies that this is an &quot;Admiralty Court&quot; and only has jurisdiction over the seas and navigable waterways.<p>The article mentioned the argument that the Federal government only has authority over D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, etc., but doesn&#x27;t say <i>why</i> some people believe that. I&#x27;ve seen two arguments for that belief. The first is that the Federal government was created by the Constitution specifically to run D.C. and other Federal territory and was not given any authority over anything else.<p>The second is that there is someplace in the tax code that says something like &quot;For purposes of this section, &#x27;United States&#x27; includes D.C., Guam, [...]&quot; and they think &quot;includes&quot; means &quot;consists of only&quot; (and they ignore the restriction to &quot;this section&quot; and so think this applies to the whole tax code).<p>I&#x27;ve never run into an argument from these people that was not, frankly, idiotic. If one of their arguments does not immediately fail due to a fundamental misunderstanding of basic English, it falls apart as soon as you try to track down original sources.