Here Comes the Tax Man

After 37 years of skirmishing, the Federal Government last week padlocked the doors of the Communist Party in the U.S. The procedure was simple: agents of the Internal Revenue Service moved in and seized property and records in five U.S. cities because the party and agencies had failed to make due accounting on income taxes.

For its part, the Government possibly stood to collect a relatively insignificant sum in back taxes and penalties and some considerably more significant information about the party's inner workings. For theirs, the Communists immediately gained some impulsive sympathy and an important propaganda advantage.

The raids, carried out simultaneously in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a day later in Detroit, showed signs of having been planned by and directed from Attorney General Herbert Brownell's Washington office. Government spokesmen tried to give the impression that Donald R. Moysey, a 45-year-old Treasury careerman who has been director of the Internal Revenue Service's Lower Manhattan district for less than two months, was solely responsible for the raids.

Moysey charged that the Communist Party owed $389,265 in back taxes, penalties and interest for 1951, and that its propaganda sheet, the Daily Worker, owed another $46,049 for 1951-53 (see PRESS). He filed liens against the party's assets in New York, where Communist national headquarters are located, and asked district directors to do the same in their cities.

Hardly had the seizure notices been posted before the uproar began. Predictably, Communists accused the Government of "Gestapo-like harassment" and an attempt to muzzle political opposition. The Civil Liberties Union rushed to the party's defense, and the editors across the United States huffed and puffed about the "threat" to the free press. In Washington Moysey's superiors said that the case was being handled "precisely as any other similar taxpayer matter would be handled."

Moysey asked Communist Party attorneys in Manhattan either to file a claim for a tax exemption or to let him look at their books. The Communists flatly refused to disclose the sources of their revenue.

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