Irwin Schiff: The Man Who Would Not Bow to the IRS
We The People for President · October 2026
Few Americans have paid a higher price for challenging the federal income tax than Irwin Schiff. For more than forty years he wrote, lectured, testified and argued that the system was being enforced against the People in ways the Constitution never intended. He never backed down. He spent much of his old age behind bars and died in federal custody in 2015, at 87 years old, still a prisoner of the government he had spent his life opposing.
From Insurance Man to Tax Rebel
Irwin Allen Schiff was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He studied economics at the University of Connecticut and built a career in insurance and finance. Like many men of his generation, he watched the dollar lose its value and the reach of Washington grow year after year. He came to believe that inflation and the income tax were two arms of the same machine, quietly draining the wealth of working families.
In 1976 he published The Biggest Con: How the Government Is Fleecing You, an attack on federal monetary and tax policy. It was the first of many books. In the years that followed he wrote How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes (1982) and The Federal Mafia: How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes (1990), and took his message to radio, television and seminar halls across the country.
His Life Mission
Schiff’s mission was simple to state: he wanted ordinary Americans to stop fearing the IRS. He believed the Sixteenth Amendment had been misread, that the income tax was being applied far beyond what Congress and the Constitution allowed, and that Americans had been frightened into a system they did not understand. He urged people to read the law for themselves, ask hard questions of their representatives, and refuse to be bullied.
What Schiff Argued in The Federal Mafia
Schiff built his life’s work around claims like these:
- Only the State holds the right to levy an income tax.
- No law requires you to file a federal income tax return.
- No law requires you to pay federal income taxes.
- No law requires you to have federal income taxes withheld from your wages, interest or dividends, and you can legally stop the withholding.
Important: Federal courts rejected every one of these arguments, and the IRS treats them as frivolous. Anyone who stops filing, paying or withholding on the strength of them faces back taxes, penalties (including a $5,000 frivolous-return penalty) and possible prosecution, as Schiff himself did. We share his arguments so you know what he stood for, not as legal advice. Our fight against the IRS is in the ballot box, the legislature and the grand jury, never by putting your family at risk.
The Price He Paid
Schiff did not merely write about his beliefs; he lived by them, and the government made him pay. He was convicted of tax offenses in the late 1970s and again in the 1980s, and served time in federal prison. He came out unbroken and went back to work.
In 2003 a federal court in Nevada ordered him to stop selling The Federal Mafia, ruling that the book promoted illegal tax evasion. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that order. For Schiff’s supporters, a federal court barring an American from selling his own book was proof of how far Washington would go to silence a critic.
In 2005, at 77 years old, he was convicted again in Las Vegas of tax evasion and conspiracy. In 2006 he was sentenced to more than twelve years in federal prison. His son, the economist Peter Schiff, publicly pleaded for his father’s release as his health failed. Irwin Schiff died of lung cancer on October 16, 2015, still in federal custody.
Why He Still Matters
Whatever one thinks of his legal theories, Irwin Schiff never stopped believing that the People, not the bureaucracy, are sovereign in America. He spent his last years in a cell rather than recant. To many patriots he is a martyr for liberty: an old man who chose prison over silence.
We honor his courage by carrying on the fight the right way. #WTPP is working to free families from the oppression of the federal income tax and the IRS through lawful, organized action: electing representatives who will repeal the income tax, using the grand jury, and building the strength of the States and the People. Read our Pillars and join the coalition.