There's a strong constitutional argument that if you don't actually owe the IRS money, and you're otherwise a regular Joe, you don't have to file.

This is different than the tax protester argument regarding the 5th Amendment.

Going back to the SCOTUS debate over Obamacare, remember that one of the conservatives' theories on its unconstitutionality hinged on an obscure concept in the Anglo-American common law that the law cannot in the first instance impose affirmative (positive) duties on a person, as opposed to prohibitions (negative duties). It most often comes up when discussing why under the common law there historically could never be an affirmative duty to provide assistance to a stranger in peril, and why courts traditionally struck down laws which created such a duty. A person must first take some significant affirmative step with the knowledge (usually implied) that he's subjecting himself to positive law. Thus, while you have no duty to help a complete stranger in peril, if you begin to help him you may have opened yourself up to legal obligations that govern your help, including whether you can withdraw it. (If you're a licensed doctor, OTOH, arguably the law could impose such a burden, but only because you first _chose_ to become a doctor, with the implicit understanding that the act of joining a highly regulated profession might attach certain obligations.)

The two big exceptions in this abstract theory are 1) taxation and 2) military service.

If you remember, Chief Justice Roberts' concurring opinion upholding Obamacare was based on his finding that the penalty for violating the individual mandate was a tax. Roberts, too, put stock in this distinction between positive and negative duties. It was difficult from an analytical standpoint not to accept that theory. If the conservative justices claimed the scope of the Commerce Clause didn't encompass the individual mandate, which thus exceeded Congress' enumerated powers, then logically neither could the Commerce Clause, e.g., support Federal prohibitions against growing and smoking marijuana in the privacy of your own home. None of the conservative justices were willing to sacrifice the War on Drugs for their principles. (Were Rehnquist and O'Connor still on the bench Obamacare would have been struck down because they dissented in the famous marijuana case 10 years earlier.) Thus, if Roberts wanted to save Obamacare while preserving the ability to reject similar but more onerous future obligations, he had no choice but to classify the penalty as a tax. He was the only justice on either side to do so. (Note that the individual mandate law was intentionally written, in part, to make the tax argument plausible. It's just that it was almost universally thought that it would live or die according to the scope of the Commerce Clause.)

Participating in commerce is another affirmative activity that allows the government to impose positive duties, and taking income for labor could arguably be considered commercial activity. Paying taxes might be another activity that could attach reporting obligations. But there are reasonable ways to differentiate those activities. Everybody, theoretically, has to work (they certainly have a right to work, at least) and if choosing to undertake simple remunerated labor opened you up to endless government regulation it wouldn't be very fair; there wouldn't be any real freedom not to subject yourself to government regulation. Similarly, because taxation is the big exception, if taxation alone could indirectly attach a bunch of ancillary obligations you're not really free to refrain from subjecting yourself to other positive law.

So, theoretically, if you're just an average working stiff who dutifully pays their taxes, there's a strong case to be made that you don't have to file with the IRS.

Until Obamacare, this facet of legal theory was mostly a curiosity which really only functioned to preserve the fiction that an individual, like in the case of this secluded Russian family, could theoretically live in some sort of state of nature free from government control.