State-based fraud in TN turns weak, poor into ‘untouchables’
If motor vehicle premiums in 2022 are $2.67 billion, that’s $66.92 million in tax revenues for state government at 2½ percent; state has financial motive to impose fraud on the people
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024 — As we come to a major filing in our case against the glowering surveillance eyeball on the tower, it occurs to me that the new outcast class in Tennessee are poor people who cannot afford insurance. These people are continually in the “Eye of Sauron” run by the department of revenue.
They are a leper class in the administrative category of “unconfirmed.” That means they are known to be customers of any of 350 approved insurance companies allowed to sell motor vehicle liability insurance policies in the state.
“Unconfirmed” means that you don’t have insurance, you are not doing business with our friends in insurance industry, and we are going to revoke your tag within four months if you don’t become a customer or send us F$65,000 “cash payment.” These are the options poor people have in Tennessee.
Buy insurance or give us a huge check. If not, well, department of revenue will revoke your registration and you face imminent arrest from police or sheriff’s deputies.
The state runs an extortion racket benefiting the insurance industry, with no outcry from ostensible defenders of the poor such as NAACP and ACLU.
Every Monday and Wednesday the department of revenue contractor i3 Verticals sends out automated letters dunning people who are not customers. On each of these two days, it’s 6,000 letters. These people who registered their cars as motor vehicles with the department of revenue, through its agent the local county clerk, are not liable for obedience to the Tennessee financial responsibility law of 1977 without a qualifying crash.
The crash makes them subject to the law and the duty to show the commissioner of safety proof of financial responsibility.
One can comply with the law without an insurance policy. But revenue says you can’t, that everyone alway has to have to carry on the proof of financial security.
The revenue commissioner, David Gerrregano serves the insurance industry by matching registrations which are state information with customer databases under the full book of business rule at T.C.A. § 55-12-122. He uses the EIVS surveillance system that is properly dubbed Eye of Sauron in the case David Tulis v. department of revenue, docket no. 23-004, a contested case operating in a bizarre legal Bermuda Triangle, or legal void.
The kommissar and his state prospers from the fraud, just as if it were a business with myriad income streams, many lawful. The state gets 2½ percent tax skim from motor vehicle insurance premiums. T.C.A. § 56-4-205. If motor vehicle premiums in 2022 are $2.67 billion ($2,677,063,051), as DOR reports, that’s $66.92 million in tax revenues for state government at 2½ percent. If half of these premiums are fruit of extortion and not voluntary, fraud in 2022 generates $33.473 million for the state.
What about in the past half decade? The past five years insurance companies charged $12.511 billion in premiums, DOR says. The state collected $312.78 million in tax on those premiums. If half of the premiums are extorted, the “free money” collected from insurers is $156.39 million in payments to the state under color of taxation.
Motive for fraud is this cash flow. Method for this fraud is an extortion program that is a “departure from the law,” hence illegal, even criminal.