By Awasen Oe
I grew up in a village of 78 people on a cliff above the ocean in Alaska. Pillars under the houses. Dial-up internet in 2004. I was running a commercial fishing operation at ten years old.
There were no cops. No code of federal regulations on the cannery wall. No forms to fill out before you could set a line. You ate when you wanted, slept when you wanted, fished when you wanted, fought when you wanted to fight, and dreamed when you wanted to dream.
Freedom wasn’t a philosophy up there. It was just Tuesday.
I’ve spent the years since then working inside a lot of different systems—construction, sales, the Navy with a Top Secret clearance, tech. Each one taught me the same thing the ocean already had: figure out what’s actually happening, not what the sign on the door says.
So when someone told me there was a guy who had been openly refusing to pay federal income taxes since 1993, had been investigated by the IRS twice, had lost in court repeatedly, and was still walking around free running his business thirty years later—I didn’t dismiss it. I pulled the court documents.
Here’s what I found.
Part I — The Curious Case
The Man Who Stopped Paying and Never Went to Prison
His name is Peymon Mottahedeh. Born in Iran in 1962. Came to the U.S., became a citizen, got a business degree from Cal State Long Beach, and then—sometime in the early nineties—decided he was done filing federal tax returns. He has not filed one since.
He built something around that decision. He calls it Freedom Law School. For over thirty years he’s been holding seminars, selling memberships, traveling the country telling anyone who’ll listen that most Americans aren’t legally required to pay federal income tax.
The IRS has known about him since 1994. They opened a criminal investigation. Then they closed it. Opened another one in 2007. Closed that one too. He is not in prison. He is, by all available evidence, still at it.
Now. Before you get excited—I’m going to tell you exactly what the courts said. Because this matters.
What the Record Actually Shows
Mottahedeh has not been winning. He has been losing, consistently, in civil court. Let me walk you through it.
1992-1994: He didn’t file. The IRS assessed deficiencies. The Tax Court upheld them. The 9th Circuit affirmed on November 19, 1998.
2008: The government had those liabilities reduced to a court-enforceable judgment. Judge Percy Anderson, Central District of California. The order reads:
“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Defendant Peymon Mottahedeh is personally liable and indebted to the United States of America… in the total amount of $90,049.57.”
He tried to appeal that one too. Dismissed—filed too late.
2001-2006: He ran Freedom Law School during these years. Conferences, memberships, books and DVDs, charged $22,000 in cash from one client alone. Filed no returns. The IRS reconstructed his income from Bureau of Labor Statistics spending data. Tax Court upheld it. Called the method permissible. Called Freedom Law School a promoter of techniques for evading the payment of federal income taxes. Peymon: $105,756 in deficiencies and penalties. His wife April: another $33,949.
2023: He appealed. Three judges on the 9th Circuit. Their conclusion, in its entirety: AFFIRMED.
Total civil liability: north of $229,000. Not counting decades of compounding interest.
His legal theories have been tested at every level. Here’s the scorecard:
| Claim | Court Response |
|---|---|
| “Wages aren’t income” | US v. Connor (3d Cir.): “Every court has unequivocally rejected this.” |
| “Voluntary means optional” | US v. Tedder (10th Cir.): “Voluntary” means you calculate it yourself, not that it’s optional. |
| “16th Amendment wasn’t ratified” | Deemed frivolous in every case ever raised. |
| “United States means only D.C.” | US v. Ward (11th Cir.): Called this a “twisted conclusion.” |
| “Trade or business = public office” | Tax Court called it “gibberish” and imposed a $7,500 penalty. |
| “5th Amendment protects you from filing” | US v. Sullivan (Supreme Court): No. |
Zero wins. Not one. And yet.
Why He’s Not in a Cell
Here’s the thing about criminal tax prosecution: it requires proving willfulness. Not just that you didn’t pay—that you knew you had a legal duty and chose to ignore it anyway. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Supreme Court addressed this in Cheek v. United States in 1991. The ruling: if a defendant genuinely believed, however unreasonably, that they weren’t required to pay—that belief can negate willfulness. It doesn’t matter if the belief is wrong. It matters if it’s sincere.
Mottahedeh has thirty years of very public, very documented, very consistent belief. Books, seminars, court filings, interviews. A defense attorney walks into that jury room with a mountain of evidence that this man genuinely thinks what he says. The jury looks at him and thinks: wrong, maybe. But sincere? Probably. That’s acquittal territory.
The DOJ doesn’t bring cases it might lose. Their criminal tax conviction rate runs above 90 percent. They protect that number.
So they went civil. Liens, judgments, deficiency assessments—all real, all on his record. But no handcuffs.
His most prominent student—Richard Thomas Grant, FLS member since 2003, income running half a million dollars a year—got convicted on three counts of tax evasion in 2016. Thirty-three months in federal prison. $402,457 in restitution. The DOJ named Mottahedeh as having attempted to assist Grant in efforts to frustrate the IRS. FLS’s response: Grant didn’t use the lawyer they recommended.
Look—he is not free because he is right. He is free because putting him in prison is harder than putting his followers there, and prosecutors don’t like losing.
A Note on the Business Model
I’m going to put this on the table because I think you deserve to see it.
Freedom Law School charges annual fees scaled to your income. Roughly $2,000 a year if you make $40K. Up to $50,000 a year for high earners. They accept payment only in cash, cryptocurrency, or gold and silver. No traceable methods. They offer a 50 percent referral commission on first-year membership fees.
The guarantee—the promise to reimburse you if the IRS comes after you—contains carve-outs for lock-in letters, backup withholding, and jeopardy assessments. Those are the IRS’s most common tools against non-filers. Their $300,000 challenge is judged by Mottahedeh himself.
He’s not a lawyer. Freedom Law School is not an accredited law school.
I’m not telling you what to think about that. I’m just telling you what I see.
Part II — The Moral Baseline
Let’s Just Say the Thing Out Loud
I spent four years in the Navy. TS/SCI clearance. I know what that money funds. I’m not going to pretend I don’t.
There’s a version of this conversation where we skip the moral part and go straight to statutes and risk percentages. A lot of writers do that. I’m not going to, because I think the moral part is where most people actually are, and I don’t believe in wasting your time.
So here it is:
It is morally wrong to threaten people with the destruction of their lives—their freedom, their family, everything they’ve built—in order to extract their labor and use it to fund harm. That is not a political position. That is a baseline. Every moral tradition that’s ever been worth a damn has recognized it.
You grow up in a village where there are no cops and you learn pretty fast: either a thing is voluntary, or it’s coercion. The language wrapped around it doesn’t change what it is.
I’ve heard the counterargument. But taxes fund roads. And schools. And hospitals.
Fine. I’m not against roads.
But nobody is offering you a line-item veto. You don’t get to fund the schools and opt out of the bombs. You don’t get to pay for the roads and decline the drone strikes. It’s all or nothing—and the nothing option comes with a threat to your freedom.
That’s not a social contract. A social contract is voluntary. This is something else.
The moral question, to me, is settled. What’s left is practical: what do you actually do about it without destroying yourself in the process?
What a Tax Return Actually Is
Let me describe what you’re doing when you file a 1040.
You are writing a detailed confession of your financial life—where your money came from, how much, from whom. You’re signing it under penalty of perjury. You’re handing it to the government, where it is stored permanently and routinely used not just in tax cases but in drug cases, fraud cases, RICO prosecutions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes looked at this in United States v. Sullivan in 1927. His ruling: you must file. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t excuse that. But—if a specific question on the return would incriminate you, you can invoke the Fifth on that specific line.
The Supreme Court said you have that right. So try it. Write “Fifth Amendment” on the income line and mail it in. The IRS will hit you with a $5,000 penalty for filing a frivolous return.
The highest court in the land says you have the right. The enforcement agency charges you five thousand dollars for using it.
Garner v. United States in 1976 tried to fix this by arguing the return isn’t “compelled” because you could have claimed the Fifth instead of answering. That’s circular—you “could have” done something they penalize you $5,000 for doing.
The courts balanced it and revenue won. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s what happened.
The People Who’ve Been Walking This Path Honestly
Mottahedeh isn’t the first person to refuse to fund violence with his labor. Thoreau went to jail over it. War tax resisters have been doing it openly since Vietnam. It’s a real tradition rooted in conscience, not legal loopholes.
The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee—nwtrcc.org—has been at it for decades. The difference from Freedom Law School: they don’t tell you the law is on your side. They say the law requires it. They explain exactly what happens when you refuse on principle, so you can make a decision with your eyes open.
No fees scaled to your income. No untraceable payments. No referral commissions. Just people who’ve been walking the path and are honest about where it leads.
If your objection is moral, those are your people.
Part III — The Actual Risk
The Numbers Nobody Puts Next to Each Other
I’m a cloud engineer. I live in data. So let’s look at the actual numbers from the IRS’s own published records, and then I’ll put them next to some numbers you already know.
| Fact | Number |
|---|---|
| Individual returns filed per year | ~161 million |
| Estimated non-filers per year | ~10 million |
| Total IRS criminal referrals (FY2024) | 1,794 (40-year low) |
| Pure failure-to-file prosecutions | <100 per year |
| Non-filer prosecution rate | 0.001% (1 in 100,000) |
| Audit rate at $100K-$200K (filers) | 0.1% (1 in 1,000) |
| IRS revenue agents lost to recent cuts | 31% (~3,600 auditors) |
Now let me put that prosecution rate next to some things you probably did this week:
| Risk | Annual Odds |
|---|---|
| Struck by lightning | 1 in 500,000 |
| Criminally prosecuted for not filing | 1 in 100,000 |
| Dying in a car accident | 1 in 8,000 |
| Being audited (if you DO file at $100K) | 1 in 1,000 |
| ER visit from a staircase injury | 1 in 1,500 |
Not filing is only five times more likely than being struck by lightning—and you don’t lose sleep over lightning. You are one hundred times more likely to be audited by filing than to be prosecuted for not filing.
Every morning you walk down your stairs, you are taking more statistical risk than a non-filer takes all year.
These are the IRS’s own numbers. I didn’t make them up.
Three Paths for Someone Making $100K
Here’s where precision matters, because the right answer depends entirely on how you earn your money.
Path A — File and Pay
| Factor | Reality |
|---|---|
| Annual cost | ~$17,000 in federal tax |
| Criminal risk | Near zero |
| Perjury exposure | Every year (signed under penalty of perjury) |
| Evidence created | Full financial map, annually |
| Moral cost | You fund whatever they decide to fund |
Certain cost: $17,000 a year. Guaranteed outcome: you don’t get a say in where it goes. This is the path that feels safe. It is also the path with a 100 percent tax on your labor that you never opted into.
Path B — Don’t File, Don’t Pay
This is the one that sounds crazy until you look at the actual statutes.
Failure to file—26 USC 7203—is a misdemeanor. Maximum one year per count.
Filing a fraudulent return—26 USC 7206—is a felony. Maximum three years.
Tax evasion with affirmative acts—26 USC 7201—is a felony. Maximum five years.
The worst criminal outcome for talking is a felony with triple the sentence of the worst outcome for silence. That’s not interpretation. Read the statutes yourself.
Filing also creates the affirmative act that makes felony evasion charges possible. Not filing doesn’t. And silence forces the government to do all its own investigative work. You hand them nothing.
Now—this matters enormously—Path B looks completely different depending on how you earn:
If you’re a W-2 employee: Your employer already told the IRS what you made. Taxes were withheld before you saw the money. At $100K, $15,000-$18,000 was taken automatically—and that amount typically covers or exceeds what you actually owe. The IRS has no deficiency to collect. No financial motive to come after you. You are not cheating them. You are forfeiting your own overpayment. Criminal prosecution risk: effectively zero.
If you’re self-employed or paid in cash: The IRS knows less. They have to reconstruct your income from scratch with an agency that just lost nearly a third of its auditors. The risk calculus shifts further in your favor.
| Factor | Reality |
|---|---|
| Criminal ceiling | Misdemeanor, max 1 year |
| Criminal probability | 0.001%/year |
| Evidence created | None |
| Perjury exposure | None |
| Moral cost | None |
| W-2 criminal risk | Effectively zero (taxes already withheld) |
The civil side is the real risk, not the criminal side. At $100K with income reporting, the IRS will eventually generate a Substitute Return. What happens after depends on enforcement resources, your profile, and timing. Penalties and interest compound. The debt doesn’t expire.
But here’s what Mottahedeh demonstrates—and this is real regardless of his bad legal theories: you can accumulate $229,000 in civil judgments and still be walking around for thirty years. The civil enforcement machine is slow, undermanned, and requires you to have visible seizable assets. He structured his financial life so he doesn’t.
He’s not winning. He’s running a thirty-year demonstration that the IRS is a paper tiger for people willing to structure their lives around it. That’s not a bug, that’s the design.
Path C — Legally Restructure to Owe Zero
This is the path that sounds like the clean answer. And in theory, it is. In practice, it has a problem.
Path C still requires filing. Filing—even a correct $0 return—creates exposure that silence doesn’t. You sign under penalty of perjury. You hand the IRS a financial map. A return showing $0 on $100K income is exactly the kind of thing that gets flagged. The moment any deduction is challenged, you’ve signed a document that can be used against you. Worst-case charge for filing something they dispute: felony. Worst-case charge for silence: misdemeanor.
The legal zero strategies are real:
| Strategy | Tax Owed | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Max Solo 401(k) + HSA + standard deduction | Near $0 | Money locked in retirement accounts |
| Foreign Earned Income Exclusion | $0 on first $126,500 | Live outside the US 330+ days/year |
| Self-employment + legitimate expenses | Varies, potentially very low | Must have real business expenses |
| Earn below filing threshold (~$14,600) | $0, no filing required | Voluntary simplicity—live on $14K |
The last one is the cleanest: earn below the threshold, don’t file, don’t owe, don’t create a record. Legal safety plus practical safety. Costs you $85K a year in income you don’t make. That’s a real commitment, not a spreadsheet exercise.
For everyone else, Path C trades some criminal ceiling for the comfort of having filed. Whether that trade makes sense depends on whether your deductions are genuinely bulletproof or just aggressively optimistic.
Part IV — The Honest Comparison
Put It All Next to Each Other
| Path A: File & Pay | Path B: Don’t File | Path C: Legal Zero | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Criminal ceiling | Near zero risk | Misdemeanor, 1 year | Felony, 3 years |
| Criminal probability | Near zero | 0.001%/year | Low but higher than B |
| Evidence created | Full financial map | None | Full financial map |
| Perjury exposure | Every year | None | Every year |
| Annual cost | ~$17K in tax | $0 now (civil debt accrues) | ~$0 in tax |
| Moral cost | Full—funding whatever they fund | None | None |
| Lifestyle impact | None | Significant (asset structuring) | Moderate (restructuring) |
On pure criminal risk, Path B has the lowest ceiling and creates the least evidence. It forces the government to do all its own work. And for W-2 earners—where the money is withheld before you touch it—the civil risk is near zero because there’s no deficiency to collect.
The real question for Path B is civil, not criminal. Are you willing to live in a way where the accumulating civil debt can’t easily reach you? Mottahedeh has been doing it for thirty years. Cash economy, untraceable assets, no conventional financial footprint. That is a lifestyle, not a loophole.
Path C is cleaner on paper. But it hands the government a document and opens the higher criminal ceiling. Whether that trade makes sense depends on whether your deductions are genuinely bulletproof or just aggressively optimistic.
The real question is: what are you actually afraid of? Answer that honestly, and the right path gets obvious.
Part V — What to Do With This
The Decision Is Yours
I spent a million dollars—money I made from Bitcoin—saving my daughter’s life. Heart transplant. No insurance. I know what it means to be inside a system that doesn’t care about you while you care desperately about something.
I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m not Peymon Mottahedeh selling you a membership. I’m not a tax attorney covering my liability with disclaimers. I’m someone who pulled the actual court documents, read the actual statutes, and thinks you deserve to see the actual numbers.
Here’s what is true:
The moral question is settled. Coercive extraction of your labor to fund harm is wrong. That is a baseline, not a political position.
The legal question is answered. Courts have ruled, unanimously and repeatedly, that the law requires you to file and pay. Mottahedeh’s legal theories are wrong. Every court said so.
The enforcement question is where it gets honest. The IRS prosecutes fewer than 100 non-filers per year out of 10 million. Criminal referrals are at a 40-year low. The agency just lost nearly a third of its auditors. For W-2 earners who are already fully withheld, not filing carries effectively no criminal risk and costs the government nothing.
Those are not my opinions. Those are the IRS’s own published numbers.
Look up the cases. Read the statutes. Look at your own situation—how you earn, what’s already withheld, what the realistic enforcement landscape looks like for someone exactly like you. Everything I’ve cited here is verifiable on public record.
I grew up somewhere that freedom wasn’t a philosophy. It was just how things were. Most people never get that baseline. But you can still choose to think clearly, look at the real numbers, and make a decision based on what’s actually true instead of what you’ve been told to be afraid of.
Nobody else gets a vote on how you live. The only question is whether the decision is informed.
Primary Sources — Look Them Up Yourself
- 9th Circuit opinion, No. 19-71432 (April 20, 2023): cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov
- IRS Criminal Investigation statistics: irs.gov/about-irs/criminal-investigation-ci-at-a-glance
- 26 USC 7201, 7203, 7206 — the actual statutes: uscode.house.gov
- Cheek v. United States (1991) — the willfulness standard: Google Scholar
- National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee: nwtrcc.org
- US v. Grant — FLS member sentenced: DOJ press release, November 2016, justice.gov
This is not legal advice. It is research. Consult a qualified attorney before making decisions about your tax obligations. The author is not affiliated with Freedom Law School or any tax resistance organization.
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