Chapter 5 of Licensed to Exploit: The OBTP Accountability Project
You know what’s worse than inventing a rule with no legal basis? Pretending it never existed.
At some point in the OBTP’s quest to crown itself national licensure king, it decided to post a simple line on its website:
“Anyone residing within the State of Oregon or outside of the State must be licensed to prepare any Oregon personal returns.”
That’s it. That was the line. Buried in a public-facing FAQ—casual as hell, authoritative in tone, and legally unsupported.
No rulemaking. No public notice. No formal opinion. Just a declarative sentence dressed up like it had statutory authority.
And then? After nearly a year of unchallenged enforcement—after sowing confusion, compliance, and fear? It vanished without a trace.
Caught in the Act
I submitted records requests asking for every document, communication, and decision that led to the creation of that FAQ. I cited ORS 192.311 through 192.431. I explained the public interest. I mentioned the 800,000+ tax preparers potentially affected by its sweeping claim.
What I received was delay. Dodging. Partial records. And a helpful invoice for thousands of dollars.
But then I found it. It. The hinge, the weak seam in the armor. I stood in front of the iron wall—the wall that others hesitated to approach. And I didn’t just stand in front of it. I stood up to it.
You don’t have to wait for the wall to threaten you before you take action. All you need is a hill—a vantage point. I found mine in ORS 28.020, the declaratory judgment statute. That was my elevation. My step up.
We’re not going to take this.
I may still only be armed with my paper sword. You may think I’m flimsy paper myself. But how many times can you fold paper until it won’t fold anymore?
Try to burn the paper? Make it go away?
Go ahead and try.
See what rises from the ashes.
Then litigation began. And suddenly, the FAQ was gone.
No notice. No correction. Just deleted.
Like it had never happened.
The Implication Is the Rule
Technically, it wasn’t a full deletion. The FAQ was replaced with a placeholder document titled: FAQ_Placeholder_Pending_New_and_amended_rule_adoption. A brief message appeared:
“Please note that the FAQ’s are currently being reworked in line with the Board’s Rule Making and will be updated accordingly upon completion of the updated rules.”
What they failed to realize is that this placeholder said the quiet part out loud: the prior FAQ was being enforced as if it had legal weight, without ever going through the rulemaking process.
By declaring the FAQ now subject to formal rulemaking, they effectively admitted that the original version should have been, too.
The OBTP never said, “We made an error.” They never said, “That FAQ was misunderstood.” Let’s be honest—they pushed it on people, and they profited from it. They never clarified, updated, corrected, or revised it.
They deleted it.
That’s not just editorial discretion. That’s retroactive erasure of a policy they had been actively enforcing.
And it’s telling.
Because if the Board believed the FAQ reflected the law, they would’ve stood by it. If they thought the statement was sound, they would’ve backed it up with statutes.
Instead, they ran.
But They Forgot the Internet Has a Memory
Unfortunately for OBTP, some of us take screenshots. Others preserve source links. And a few of us were already preparing for a legal challenge when the wipe occurred.
The deleted FAQ lives on. In newsletters. In cached copies. In public records. And in the growing mountain of evidence that OBTP makes up rules first—and reads the law later.
Next: Selective Enforcement – Why CPAs and attorneys get a pass, but everyone else pays the price.