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The Benefits of Common Law Factors are Outweighed by the Risks of the Collapse of the Judiciary System.

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Many people if they have heard of common law factors have met them in the context of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS in a move in keeping with the common law tradition of the United States has turned to what they call the set of twenty factors in order to define rulings for different cases.

It is an interesting development of the common law system because it lies beyond the United States court structure.

Even though the IRS is a legally constituted government entity, it is distinct from the judiciary branch as defined by the U.S. constitution.

A major goal of the IRS is to maintain taxation that is both impartial, fair and sufficient for national requirements.

It needs to have objective measures for the different cases where tax applies.

The factors, which have been defined by the IRS, are a move towards this.

Yet the difficulty is in the notion of extending common law in this sense to the IRS which is clearly not a law court and not part of the Federal legal system.

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Available for Anyone

If other government agencies were to extend common law principles in the same way as these common law factors, we might see for example the department of homeland security suddenly setting up its own legal system.

In this way, not only would it be able to apply the already comprehensive powers, which various acts have granted it, but it would then, independently of the rest of the legal system, be able to conduct hearings and trials of the people involved.

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Dangerous Ideals that Undermine Constitutional Stability

It is a dangerous precedent, which has also spilled over into the common law courts, which are being set up on an independent basis in a number of states in the U.S.

These courts are not part of the U.S. legal system, but persist in indicting and sometimes threatening officials in various public departments, as well as issuing judgments and liens, which have no official or legal value.

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Time to Take the Blindfold Off

While is may not be appropriate to revert to completely centralized law making and law application, any devolution of responsibility such as common law factors needs to be clearly defined and delimited.

The legal system in the United States involves courts at various levels and appointed officials who are set in place to apply the principles with precision and impartiality.

It is not for nothing that justice is depicted as having its eyes blindfolded and a pair of scales in its hands.

Unfortunately if having its eyes blindfolded also means that it does not see how paralegal systems are be mushrooming in the land, it may be time to take the blindfold off, albeit temporarily.

The IRS states that its twenty classification common law factors should be used only as guidelines and admits that application of the twenty factors to a particular situation can be both difficult and confusing.

From a point of view of general comprehension of the public, it might also be more appropriate that the IRS reduces references to common law, and simply retains the notion of having a job to do and a need to fairly and objectively classify different situations for tax purposes.

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