After enjoying a period of considerable growth and popularity among anti-government extremists, the right-wing tax protest movement has experienced a decline in its fortunes.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the tax protest movement soared in popularity, even as the kindred militia and sovereign citizen movements declined.  The reason, in large part, was due to federal and local law enforcement scrutiny.  Militia members across the country received sentences for convictions on weapons, explosives, and conspiracy charges, while sovereign citizens were arrested by the dozens on charges related to their frauds, scams, and "paper terrorism" tactics.  In sharp contrast, however, the federal government found it increasingly hard to deal with tax protesters after the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service was slashed by Congress following high-profile hearings about the IRS in 1997.  As a result, the number of tax protesters, as well as their boldness, grew considerably.

However, in the mid-2000s, the Bush administration worked with Congress to restore much of the IRS's enforcement budget, and the tax protest movement began to feel the effects as prominent leaders and members were arrested or convicted and tax protest schemes were shut down by the courts.  Many of these schemes involved large scale tax scams using pseudo-legal tax protest arguments, which raked in tens of millions of dollars and also cost the federal government many millions as well.

Selected recent incidents, out of many, include:

• February 2007.  U.S. Marshals arrested Charles Conces, the leader of a tax protest group known as the National Lawman Committee for the Public Interest, on contempt of court charges for allegedly failing to obey a federal court order to disclose information about individuals associated with his group and Web site.  The previous April, the court enjoined Conces from preparing tax returns and promoting several alleged tax fraud schemes.
• December 2006.  A federal court in Baltimore barred the Save-a-Patriot Fellowship, a longstanding and large tax protest organization, and its leader, John Kotmair, Jr., from allegedly selling a tax protest scheme based on the "Section 861" argument, which claims that U.S. citizens do not have to pay taxes on income earned within the United States.
• November 2006.  A federal court in South Carolina stopped  Greenville resident John Howard Alexander, along with his ex-wife, Heather Ferguson (barred by a court in July), from selling several different tax protest schemes, that allegedly cost the U.S. government $48 million.
• November 2006.  Federal authorities arrested Eddie Ray Kahn in Florida for conspiracy to defraud the government with an alleged tax scheme.  Kahn ran the groups American Rights Litigators and Guiding Light of God Ministries.  One of Kahn's co-defendents in the case is the actor Wesley Snipes, indicted on eight counts of tax fraud.
• July 2006.  California tax protester George "Nick" Jesson pleaded guilty in Santa Ana to state tax evasion charges; in April, he pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges.  In 2002, Jesson ran for governor of California on a platform that claimed that taxes were unconstitutional and did not have to be paid.  He also announced, in an advertisement in the newspaper USA Today, that he had stopped withholding taxes from the paychecks of the employees of his electronics firm.
• April 2006.  The federal government sued a Michigan tax protester, Peter Hendrickson, and his wife, Doreen, to stop them from promoting an alleged tax protest scheme through his book "Cracking the Code."  Several associates of the Hendricksons in various states were also named.  In 1992, Hendrickson was convicted for firebombing a Royal Oak, Michigan, post office box on April 15, 1990 (income tax day), and spent a year in prison.
• February 2006.  Long-time prominent tax protest leader Irwin Schiff received a 13 year federal prison sentence in Las Vegas after being convicted of conspiracy, tax evasion, and tax fraud.  During his trial, Schiff bragged that his followers had avoided paying $2 billion in taxes using his methods.