Originally published on Forbes.com Nov 19th, 2014
Recently I suggested that the government may be going overboard in prosecuting Kent Hovind for mail fraud. There has been quite a bit of criticism of my view, although much to my annoyance little of it here. It sometimes strikes me that the internet is composed mainly of echo chambers where people of essentially like mind play spirited games of Tastes Great!” Less Filling!. If you are going to insult me, I really appreciate it if you would leave a comment here.
Why People Think I Am Wrong
On the Sensuous Curmedgeon, I read:
Anyway, we shall henceforth consider Forbes to be a source of creationist news instead of business information. A pity, really. They used to be good.
The commenters were even harsher although I was pleased that one noted that I was probably not a “clueless rube”.
Probably the best summation of how wrong people might think I am is on a site called FOGBOW (Falsehoods Unchallenged Only Fester and Grow)
I see no reason to feel even the slightest bit of sympathy for Hovind, he set out to cheat the tax man and did everything he could, including getting his wife involved in it, and since then he has done every little obstructionist thing he could manage along the way. He is neither repentant or being honest about what happened, “he is being picked on and singled out”, and he has continued that meme throughout the entire process. He has violated every court order issued, and has not changed one bit from the day he was convicted. He deserves neither sympathy or consideration, and it is a pretty good bet that rather than getting out early he is going to extend his stay a good deal by his contempt conviction. The man is a four star fool. Reilly is either incredibly gullible, or else blind to what has been going on as his writings indicate.
Kent Hovind Is Annoying
I have to admit that there is quite a strong argument there, because my fluctuating sympathy for Kent Hovind always hits a new low whenever I listen to one particular person. That would be Kent Hovind. He has been giving interviews from jail. Here is a sample (Start at 13:00).
It does not go very far before he says “I have not broken any laws”. When he talks about what he has been convicted of, he always tends to focus on the structuring charges, since it can strike many of us that taking cash out of the bank in amounts less than ten thousand dollars does not seem like something that should get you in trouble. Of course that leaves out the fact that Kent was not filing individual returns, which is evidenced by the Tax Court decisions he and his wife lost. The latter was what got me following this story just over two years ago. The technique that he used has had a place on the IRS Dirty Dozen from time to time.
In 2002 Mr. Hovind decided to change the ownership structure of CSE and to that end contacted Glenn Stoll, the director of Remedies at Law. Mr. Stoll directed clients to form personal ministries which, once created, could be used to form ministerial trusts to manage ministry assets including management of assets on a tax-free basis. Mr. Stoll directed clients to associate each ministerial trust with a corporation sole.
What is so annoying about Hovind’s attitude is that the tax law is generally quite friendly to religion, much to the frustration of our friends at the Freedom From Religion Foundation who recently lost their case against the parsonage exclusion in the Seventh Circuit. According to his son Eric, Kent is ordained as an Independent Baptist Minister and lived quite modestly plowing everything back into the ministry.
There are several ministries promoting the oxymoronic concept of “creation science” that have 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. Included among them is God Quest Inc which is run by Eric. CSE did not meet the definition of a church so it would have had to apply, but there is no reason to think it would not have qualified. Kent could have elected out of social security on his earnings from ministry and taken the bulk of his compensation as a housing allowance. So he ends up being a defier of taxes that he could mostly have legitimately avoided.
How Not To Run A Ministry
Instead, he chose the “corporation sole” route, which is probably about the worst idea that has ever come down the pike for ministries that are dominated by a single individual. Kent Hovind seems to be incapable of ever admitting that he was wrong about anything. I really can’t expect people with a strong evangelical perspective to put much stock in what a religious liberal like me would have to say, but I really encourage them to take a look at the Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship set forth by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Creation Science Evangelism under Kent Hovind could be used as a text book example of how not to run a ministry.
I asked ECFA for a comment on the case and got this from President Dan Busby
Until you brought Kent Hovind and Creation Science Evangelism to my attention, I was not familiar with him or his organization. Since ECFA does not have a relationship with this organization, we have no knowledge of this situation. The media reports suggest he was imprisoned for failure to pay employer-related taxes to the tune of over $800,000.All I can say is that one of ECFA’s Standards requires our member organizations to comply with applicable laws and regulations:
Kent of course has a story that says that he has been complying with the law, but when enough courts have told you that you are wrong, there comes a time when you really should start thinking that you are wrong, even if your cellmate tells you are you are right.
Still Think Prosecution May Be A Bad Idea
So why you may I ask do I think it might be a bad idea to prosecute Kent Hovind for mail fraud. Unlike, most normal people, I actually at least look at and entirely read a very large percentage of tax cases. If you do that you will see, almost every day, people engaged in civil litigation, who, in principle, have committed tax crimes. I have to agree with many of the people that have been critical of my view on Kent’s prosecution that sovereign citizen tax defiers are particularly pernicious although I’m sure that most of the tax gap is generated by more passive aggressive players. At any rate, according to the analysis in Jack Townsend’s Federal Tax Crimes (pdf download) the Criminal Enforcement Section of the Department of Justice Tax Division has very limited resources and they need to extract the most possible deterrence from every single prosecution:
Given the limited resources through the criminal tax enforcement system, CES must coordinate and prioritize. CES does that by prosecuting relatively few cases each year (in recent years from 1100 to 1800 per year), but focusing on the strongest cases where conviction is virtually assured and by picking targets with a sufficiently high profile (for whatever reason) that the conviction might be publicized and encourage compliance by persons who become aware of the convictions.
The point is to encourage compliance, not get retribution of every offense. I don’t see the prosecution of Kent Hovind encouraging compliance. Either he will be convicted and viewed as a martyr or he will be acquitted and the acquittal will energize tax protesters.
According to Gallup 42% of Americans believe that God created humans pretty much as they are now less than ten thousand years ago. That is a little disturbing, but when I asked a friend of mine with biological training if there were things that we use that wouldn’t work if you didn’t believe in evolution, he didn’t come up with anything. Leaders in the “creation science” movement have been encouraging Kent Hovind to give up fighting the IRS and focus more on creation science. The prosecution motivates Kent to keep up the tax fight and possibly drag some part of the 42% into sovereign citizen tax defiance. Even though I believe in evolution and that the world is billions of years old, I would rather have Kent Hovind trying to convince people that the world is 6,000 years old than encouraging crackpot tax theories. I think the latter are more harmful. That’s why I think the current prosecution might not be a good idea.
No Kent Hovind post of mine would be complete without some humor. You can find a lot of humor in Hovind material, but my favorite of late is this tweet.
#FunFact: Kent Hovind technically meets all the qualifications to become a Batman villain, right down to the disused theme park.