Originally published on Forbes.com Apr 21st, 2013
Back in January, I wrote a piece on the “tax planning” tips I had picked up from Repairman Jack. Jack, whom I should mention right away is a fictional character, avoids taxes by living entirely “off the grid”. He manages to do this hiding in plain sight in Manhattan. The title of “repairman” is metaphorical. What Jack does is fix situations, that the affected people cannot bring to the authorities. For example, you have a rare sword stolen from you. You cannot report it to the authorities, because, even though you have a moral right to the sword, you are not technically the legal owner. Contact Jack. Maybe he will help. For a price.
Jack is the creation of F. Paul Wilson and the Repairman Jack corpus is a subset of a larger story referred to as The Secret History of the World. It is most rewarding if you can read the books in story order, which is different from publication order. It will be a while before you meet Jack, if you do it that way, so you might want to start with The Tomb and then go back. Reading the whole corpus is a significant commitment, particularly if you have a tax blog to maintain and a new Margaret Fuller biography comes out while you are at it. Nonetheless, I am closing in on it. I want to share a couple of the additional tips that I have learned from studying Jack, but the most intriguing question is whether Repairman Jack could ever become Citizen Jack.
How To Handle Your Mail
Jack’s fixes have made him some enemies, who fortunately have a hard time finding him, since he has no official existence. He has managed to create quite a few notional people, whom he will be when he is called upon to present a document such as a drivers license. He keeps the private investigator license of someone who died current, which sometimes comes in handy. Several of his notional people have credit cards. He is scrupulous about paying the bills timely and accordingly they have good credit ratings. Of course, he cannot have this mail coming to his house, so he uses services like Mailboxes Etc. He has five of them that all forward mail to one of them. He goes there to pick up mail at irregular hours and is in and out as quickly as possible.
What About A Car ?
Jack was a little careless about security cameras once, causing the license plate of the car he was driving to be noted. This resulted not in bad guys showing up at his place, which would have been bad enough. They showed up at the address of the love of his life Gia, where she lived with her daughter, eight-year old Vickie. By borrowing Gia’s car, he had endangered her. Jack’s solution to the car problem was inspired. He purchased a Crown Victoria, with a trunk large enough to hold several bodies, and duplicated the plates and registration of one Vincent Donato “Vinny Donuts”, an organized crime boss, who also had a Crown Victoria. In the event he was stopped, he would say he ran errands for Mr. Donato. Anyone who decided to hunt him down based on his license plates would find out they had bitten off more than they could chew.
Can Repairman Jack Ever Become Citizen Jack ?
Jack likes living off the grid, but his concern for Gia and Vickie has caused him to think from time to time about legalizing himself. How does someone who is in his mid-thirties do that, if he has never had a social security number in his true identity ? That was troubling me. I suspect there might be a few people out there like that. What if your parents were hardcore hippies and you were home birthed, home schooled and then just drifted from commune to commune ? You think the social security people would buy that ? The rule is that if you are over 12, you have to apply for your number in person. His good friend Abe figured something out for him.
Jack would go to a country in which there had been extreme strife and much destruction of records. He would come to the United States as a refugee. Citizenship would be a piece of cake, since he would marry Gia, which was the point of the exercise. It would be too much of a spoiler to get into what happened, but I thought the plan had quite a bit of merit and might well have worked. Something to think about if you have been living off the grid and have a lover who would like you to legalize things. Maybe if you don’t have as much baggage as Jack, you might want to try the hard-core hippy parent story first.
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Afternote:
Here is the rule from the social security website.
Anyone age 12 or older requesting an original Social Security number must appear in person for an interview. We will ask for evidence to show you do not have a Social Security number. Here are examples of documents you can use to prove a Social Security number was never assigned:
- If you lived outside the United States for an extended period, a current or previous passport, school and/or employment records, and any other record that would show long-term residence outside the United States could be used to show you do not have a Social Security number.
- If you have lived in the United States and you are applying for an original Social Security number, we may ask you for information about the schools you attended or we may ask you to provide copies of tax records that would show you were never assigned a Social Security number