As the old saying goes, "The two things you can't avoid are death and taxes".
Under certain circumstances, taxes can be discharged. It's basically all a matter of timing. If the income taxes are for a tax year that's over three years ago and you filed your tax return for that year a least two years ago AND the taxes weren't assessed within the last 240 days, your in luck.
If you're reading this in 2000, the tax years you can get rid of are 1996 and earlier if you filed the return over two years ago haven't recently been assessed taxes for 1996.
This is a very tricky area and timing is everything.
Updated 2/13/2012