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Hawaii's State Department of Taxation launched a round of criminal prosecutions for general excise tax violations — the first such prosecutions in many years — prompting competing views on whether the crackdown was fair or overreaching. Ray Kamikawa, Director of Taxation, defended the initiative as a principled effort to enforce longstanding law evenly, arguing that selective non-enforcement in earlier years had never constituted a promise of immunity and that individuals with professional knowledge of tax law had no excuse for noncompliance. Stephen Pingree, a criminal tax defense attorney, countered that prosecuting defendants for conduct occurring before the crackdown began — in years when enforcement was demonstrably lax — amounted to selective prosecution targeting high-profile figures in specific industries for political purposes, and that a tax amnesty should accompany any new enforcement regime. Caller Sam Slom, head of Small Business Hawaii, argued that the state's overall tax burden and anti-business policies were the deeper problem, and that the crackdown was compounding damage to a shrinking private sector. The standing question is whether Hawaii's renewed criminal tax enforcement, directed at professionals who failed to file general excise returns in prior years, is constitutionally sound or selectively unfair.
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Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
