Taxpayer Dollars Under the Microscope: New Mexico’s School Credit, Frontier-Market Audits and a Hague Delegation

Three separate developments this month show how closely taxpayer dollars and tax rules now shape public life. New Mexico is opening a new stream of school funding through a federal credit, US multinationals face a sharper audit environment abroad, and a group of US taxpayers is preparing to carry its evidence to The Hague. Each story turns on the same question: who benefits when tax money and tax rules cross a border or a budget line?

New Mexico Opts Into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in Santa Fe that she will opt New Mexico into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC). The decision opens a new public school funding opportunity for literacy and math initiatives, after school programs, computer resources and more. She framed the move as a response to shrinking federal support for classrooms.

“At a time of diminishing federal investment in education, New Mexico must take advantage of every dollar we can to bolster public education and continue our state’s upward trajectory in literacy and student achievement,” said Gov. Lujan Grisham. “By participating in the FSTC, we will give New Mexico taxpayers the chance to keep some of their federal income taxes in New Mexico to support New Mexico students.”

Beginning in 2027, taxpayers can claim a federal income tax credit of up to $1,700 annually, or $3,400 for joint filers. The credit applies to qualifying cash donations to approved nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations, known as SGOs. Those groups will award scholarships for students in grades kindergarten through twelve at both public and private schools.

The scholarships can pay for academic tutoring and special education services, before- and after-school programs, technology, books and supplies. They can also cover public school-charged fees for supplemental programming. A student who struggles in reading or math could receive tutoring, while a family could use a scholarship for a computer, educational software or internet access.

The Lujan Grisham administration will certify all SGOs that meet the criteria, as the law requires, and will try to identify the strongest ones. The governor stressed partnerships as the path to results.

“The importance of building partnerships to deliver for New Mexico students cannot be overstated, and that is exactly what my administration intends to do,” the governor said.

The administration says participation will not cost New Mexico taxpayers or adversely affect state tax revenues or appropriations. The credit reduces a donor’s federal income tax obligation while directing money to New Mexico students. Public schools also stand to gain new support for supplemental programs that prepare students for college and careers.

Frontier Markets Move From Paperwork to Enforcement

Tax pressure on US companies looks very different overseas. For years, US multinationals treated transfer pricing in frontier markets as a box-ticking exercise: prepare a local file, submit it and move on. That assumption is now a liability, because administrations across Africa, and in parts of Latin America and Asia, are filing, benchmarking and adjusting electronically.

Most of 2025 kept US tax teams focused on Paris and Washington. The G7’s June 2025 agreement and the Inclusive Framework’s January 2026 side-by-side package took US-parented groups out of the Pillar Two income inclusion and undertaxed profits rules. The same package confirmed that qualified domestic minimum top-up taxes still apply to them. The fight over who taxes US profits abroad did not end; it moved to the source countries.

Angola and Mozambique show the shift in compressed form. Both host significant US capital in oil, gas, mining and services, and both moved from dormant transfer pricing regimes to electronic filing and database-driven audits within a decade. Neither has an income tax treaty with the US.

That combination carries a stark risk. In these jurisdictions, no mutual agreement procedure runs and no correlative adjustment is available, and foreign tax credits often fail to offset the damage. The next significant cross-border tax cost for many US groups may therefore come from transfer pricing adjustments rather than from a global minimum tax.

Why Documentation No Longer Shields Companies

For most of the last decade, rules modeled on the OECD Guidelines or the UN Practical Manual sat on the statute books while few officials read the local files. Audit teams lacked comparables, trained staff and case-selection systems, so a US group could treat these jurisdictions as low-risk. Three changes have converged to end that comfort.

• Filing has gone digital. Returns, invoices and transfer pricing files now arrive in structured electronic form, so an administration can screen every filer rather than wait for a referral.
• Auditors now hold the data. Commercial comparables databases and regional benchmarking sets give examiners the benchmarks they once lacked.

The experience in these African countries previews what US tax teams should expect, and plan for, across the frontier markets in their footprint.

Taxpayers Take Their Case to The Hague

A very different use of the taxpayer identity will play out on Wednesday, 11 November 2026. A delegation of U.S. taxpayers and international human rights attorneys will arrive at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They plan to hand-deliver evidence to the Office of the Prosecutor and call for arrest warrants against President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other senior U.S. officials. The delegation alleges they aided and abetted Israel in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

The submission rests on nearly a year of work by the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG). It includes sworn affidavits from doctors who worked in Gaza, firsthand eyewitness accounts, whistleblower testimony and videos. It also contains extensive documentation of U.S. political, military, diplomatic and financial support. The group calls the action historic and unprecedented, since U.S. citizens, acting as taxpayers whose money has financed the weapons and the political cover, are placing top officials before the Court.

The delivery follows a federal court victory that protected TAAG’s First Amendment right to share the evidence with the Court. The group says the Trump administration had moved to block cooperation with the ICC through sanctions and an executive order.

The delegation points to Israeli officials to illustrate its argument about dependence. In September 2024, a senior Israeli Air Force official told Haaretz that Israel would have struggled to sustain the war for more than a few months without U.S. weapons. A month later, former Mossad intelligence director Zohar Palti made a similar point to The Washington Post.

In October 2024 former Mossad intelligence director Zohar Palti told The Washington Post: “Without the U.S. weapons, Israel cannot fight.”

The delegation’s message is direct: those who finance, arm and abet genocide are not above international law. It describes international law as the only binding framework through which state and non-state actors answer for mass atrocity, and it says that framework is now under sustained attack.

One Thread Across Three Stories

The stories differ in scale and stakes, yet each turns on how tax money and tax rules move beyond their familiar boundaries. New Mexico wants federal tax dollars to stay in local classrooms, multinationals face enforcement abroad that treaties do not soften, and a group of taxpayers is asking an international court to scrutinize how their own government spends. Each shows taxpayers and companies discovering that the old assumptions about where tax obligations end no longer hold.