With income tax day just two months away, and a story in our recent editions about a local merchant getting nabbed by the IRS, perhaps now is a good time to retell an old story to reemphasize the cautionary tale told by the news and comment from our readers on the Internet.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear in the not too far off county of Franklin and the railroad town of Cowan where there once lived a man named Tupper Saussy. He died almost 11 months ago in Nashville where he'd been successful as an artist and was the creator of TV spots for Purity Dairies.

In the mid- and late 1980s, Tupper came to believe that the federal income tax system wasn't right and that payments in the form of Federal Reserve Notes instead of certificates backed by gold and silver were illegal. His arguments were complicated and he was charged by the feds for not filing income tax returns. He'd been writing to the IRS saying he'd be glad to pay, but he wanted to know what form of currency was right. Two cases against him failed. One stuck.

He was ordered to report to a federal penitentiary near Atlanta so he went there with a video camera and stood in front of the institution were there was a sign that stated it was federal property and people should go away. Facing the camera with the recording tape rolling, Tupper announced that he'd followed the court's order by reporting to the prison and that it told him to go away, so he did. The tape was mailed to a TV station in Chattanooga and was broadcast as Tupper took it on the lam.

He was gone for practically a decade, but captured, and another term was tacked on to the time he faced for not paying money to the feds.

Clearly, more can be found out about Tupper by Googling his name. The point here is that tax season cometh and the IRS has clever PR men who send stories to newspapers and radio stations where there are prosecutions for failure to pay.

I've received them at radio stations in Virginia and Georgia before I ever heard of Tupper Saussy. Newspapers where I've worked in Maryland and Tennessee received the reports and they're always rewritten for the readers.

America has a higher compliance rate for paying income taxes than other countries. Reports from France say that tax dodge is a sport.

Regardless of your position on the system, it's clear to me there could be improvements.

There's been a lot of talk recently about our federal leaders governing through fear. It's not a new tactic.

Should the media play a role in that in the weeks before tax day? It's a fair question for our Internet readers' commentary. The stories will always be told, though.

The ones that got away are the stories we'd like to tell, if we knew them.