I haven’t, but I know that complex tax systems allow scope for minimising ones tax liability. If the bureaucrats understand it well enough to put up a fight, they’re offered private sector jobs to get them out of the way.
Generally speaking, the less money you earn, the worse things are for you. ‘Progressive’ income taxes are never progressive.
Apparently it is a lot simpler than that... it seems like nowhere in the tax laws does it specify that what people think as normal income is actually taxable. @larkenrose has communicated this in a lot of different social media platforms and I am still trying to finish reading the whole story but it is quite fascinating whichever way you think about it (that this gap exists and that someone could find something like this and be punished for it).
I remember reading stuff about that a few years ago and seeing a video of some former IRS worker saying that she couldn't find any law that compelled people to pay federal taxes. She stopped paying taxes, someone found the law and she went to jail.
Interesting. From what I read of larkenrose's book, he couldn't find any law that specified income deriving from within the US by ordinary citizens to be taxable, and they couldn't find him guilty of wilfully not paying tax, but he went to jail anyway. Unfortunately no such loopholes seem to exist in the Australian Tax Laws, so people have to exploit it in other ways :p
It isn’t what current legislation actually states, but how that legislation is interpreted by the courts, who will be the ones banging the gavel before they find you guilty. They know who butters their bread.