Monday, April 26, 2021

Mesira if required by government?

 Igros Moshe (C.M. 1:92): Is it permitted to take a job as a government financial auditor when there are times when he will find fraud and therefore he would have to inform (moser) on the transgressor to the government which will punish the tax cheat more than the proscribed by the Torah? Yes it is permitted since the job of government auditor is to find transgressions. It is clear however that if this person did not accept the job there will obviously be others to take the job and they will find the transgressions. Consequently the transgressor suffers the same loss  whether this person takes the job or not or someone else takes the job and he doesn’t cause him any harm.. Therefore if no one is actually harmed by his taking the job it isn’t relevant to prohibit taking the job…. And this is exactly our case when the government orders someone to bring their account books to be examined by an auditor because the government already controls the situation to find his fraud and will find it through any one of their auditors. Therefore this is another reason for exempting any particular auditor when they find fraud…. And even if they don’t force him to testify but he is required to testify about the fraud because this is like the case of someone designated to testify for a non‑Jews and he is fact required because of chillul hashem that would result if he didn’t testify. This is the accepted  halacha (C.M. 28:3)


12 comments:

  1. It is halachicly prohibited to accept a plea bargain that requires you to commit mesira against other Jews in order to obtain a lighter sentence for yourself.

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  2. You cannot be oiver on mesira to save your own skin. No one paskened such a Heter exists.

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  3. Source? According to you it should be easy to find

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  4. You need to provide a source that you can throw the issur of mesira out the window for the purpose of savings your own skin, if you assert such a Heter exists to engage in mesira to save yourself from prison.

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  5. You are making the claim - so you need to provide a source for your claim.

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  6. I'm not making any claims. I'm simply saying you cannot throw the Halacha out of the window and disregard it in order to get a better deal. You're making the claim that you can disregard the Halacha to benefit yourself. So you need to provide a source for that.

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  7. I already gave sources that there is no issur of mesrira when dealing with community or personal threats

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  8. This discussion is about tax cheats. Your point about a threat to the community isn't germane to this thread. If two Jews were in business and both cheated on their taxes. And if the government offers Jew 1 a plea bargain offer to become a cooperating witness against Jew 2 in the tax cheating charges against him, in exchange for no (or less) prison time, Jew 1 is halachicly required to refuse to cooperate with the government by being a moser against Jew 2 even if that results in himself (Jew 1) getting locked up in prison.

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  9. really?! Didn't see that in the tshuva.
    If mandated by law both brothers would be obligated to cooperate and neither would be considered a moser

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  10. Obviously every government's law is that you must report any crime to them. That doesn't negate that mesira is forbidden.

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  11. Really?
    Says you and Hirschman against the sources I cited already

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