No charges have been filed yet against an Internal Revenue Service agent who witnesses say assaulted a taxpayer with a chair during a recent hearing in Las Vegas.
According to the Las Vegas Tribune newspaper, the Oct. 10 incident occurred when Wiley Davis, an IRS Team Manager from Colorado, became agitated with Las Vegas resident Ken Nicholson during a hearing to discuss an IRS lien against some property owned by Nicholson.
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During the hearing, Nicholson said he would be willing to pay whatever the IRS said he owed if Davis could produce the section of IRS code authorizing the lien against his property.
Witnesses told the paper that when Davis could not produce that code, he became angry, lost his self-control and threw a chair at Nicholson.
“Davis then grabbed the chair and hit Nicholson in the groin and legs. Security officers came in and stopped the melee. Police arrived shortly thereafter and are now investigating,” the paper said.
Nicholson came to the hearing with materials he had obtained from noted tax expert Irwin Schiff.
Keith Milbourn, a friend of Nicholson who had come to the meeting with him, described the incident.
“By the time we called the police there were about ten people in the hallway including other agents, the witnesses and security guards,” Milbourn told the paper, adding that another IRS agent who was in the room, Renee Swells, was reportedly “surprised and shocked” by Davis’ action.
Both men said they tried to report the incident to the U.S. attorney’s office, as well as the FBI, but both Justice Department entities declined to take their report.
“I know that if I would have assaulted the IRS agent, I would be sitting in jail right now,” Nicholson told the paper. “But because the IRS agent is the one who assaulted me, Metro [Las Vegas Police] only took a statement and let him go.”
A spokesman for the Las Vegas Police Department told WorldNetDaily that investigators informed Nicholson he had to contact the department within five days of the incident if he wanted to initiate action against Davis, since it was “just a misdemeanor battery.” LVMPD officials say Nicholson has not contacted the department seeking action against Davis.
The spokesman also said the department “gave all of the information to the IRS Criminal Investigation Division.”
“If [Nicholson] wants prosecution, he can contact the general investigations division” within the department “and they can move forward on it,” the spokesman added.
Said Schiff in an e-mail alert, “The public has got to ask itself, why would an IRS agent get so upset simply because the taxpayer asked to see the law?”
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