Paying Your Taxes

Some school children in the US have been punished for paying for their school lunch in pennies: it started as a prank, but the authorities didn't find it funny.  But it leads to this question from James D. Miller:

Could you pay your taxes in pennies?

To which the answer, here in the UK, is no, you can't. Coins are only legal tender up to certain amounts. Apologies, I don't have the actual limits to hand, but it's something like pennies, up to 50p, 2 ps up to a pound and so on. People do not have to take coins for any amount, certainly not in the manner that they have to take notes.

However, the situation in the US is rather different. I once checked this out with the US Mint when I was having an argument with a particularly annoying bureaucrat over the payment of a fee.

Coins in the US are indeed legal tender. Yes, the taxman does indeed have to accept them for the settlement of any tax debt, however large. No, they do not have to be rolled or bagged: trundle the wheelbarrow of unsorted pennies up to the window and force them to count it. A truck load? They must accept it.

Sadly, despite the joy this brought to me, the idea of annoying taxmen so much, I was also told that paying one's taxes in this manner would almost certainly (however illegally) lead to one being audited.

So perhaps this is something only to be used by those who have indeed already just been audited?

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