Fresno Crunch : IRS Office Seeks to Cope With Annual Onslaught of Tax Documents

This is the busiest week of the year for 4,300 men and women who work at a one-story concrete building that covers an area roughly equal to 12 football fields on the southeast side of Fresno.

The sign on the building’s stone facade reads Internal Revenue Service Center, and it is here that more than 11 million tax returns will be received this year--2.5 million of them during the next few days.

“Californians,” said Theron C. Polivka, director of the center, “are prone to procrastination.”

Still, he expects no major problems.

Earlier this month, IRS officials in Washington said problems with a new computer were delaying refund checks. But Polivka, 41, said such reports “are simply not true” for his facility, which is the largest of the nation’s 10 IRS Centers.

So far, he said, more than $3.4 billion has gone out in refunds to nearly 4 million taxpayers in California and Hawaii--an average refund of $874--and Polivka said he is confident the work will continue to flow smoothly.

“We are making the refund payments on schedule and plan to continue to do so,” he said.

Returns continued to arrive by the truckload Tuesday--the day after the deadline--but the workers processing 20,000 of them per hour seemed well able to cope.

On arrival, returns are spilled from their mail sacks onto sorting machines.

People do not open envelopes at the Fresno Center; machines do that, and move the returns along to 625 data transcribers, who type all pertinent information into the computer system for processing.

This week, and for the rest of the month, they will be working an average of 10 hours a day, six days a week--and the 128 people processing returns that qualify for refunds will be working a seventh 10-hour day--to handle the “last-minute” filings.

Polivka shook his head over that.

Californians consistently file later than taxpayers in all other parts of the nation, he said, and “we simply don’t know why.”

“Most amazing is that 75% of the people filing through our center (who are) entitled to refunds also delay preparing their returns, giving Uncle Sam the use of their money for an extra two or three months.” Nonetheless, the law says the government has to pay interest on any refund not paid within 45 days of the April 15 filing deadline, and this was one of the facts that led to the nationwide flap over computer delays.

There were also tales of deliberate return-shredding by overworked employees.

Polivka dismisses such talk.

Every year, he said, there are “the most incredible horror stories . . . about destruction of returns in the IRS Centers. To my knowledge, there is not a shred of evidence that it happens.”

As for the delays:

Glade Hirschi, assistant chief for computer operations, acknowledged that during January and early February the new $103-million Sperry computer system was processing returns at a slower pace than had been anticipated.

“But it was a shakedown period,” Hirschi said. “We had hardware, software and training problems. But now we’re back . . . in super shape.”

“The government is extremely sensitive about paying people money due on refunds,” Polivka said. “And the government wants to collect as quickly as possible from those who owe the IRS money.”