70 Answer Plea From the IRS to Clear Up Delinquent Taxes

“Amnesty from IRS.”

Myrna Toone said she saw the words flash on a TV news graphic two nights ago. “I thought, heaven must be speaking to me!” she said.

When Toone, a 57-year-old Palmdale nurse, responded Saturday to what the Internal Revenue Service insists is not an offer of amnesty but a call for citizens to make payments of back taxes “as easy and painless as possible,” she arrived at a makeshift collection center in the Van Nuys federal building feeling “like a bad girl called to the principal’s office.”

But when she walked away 15 minutes later, she took a deep breath and said: “I now feel like a responsible person. I no longer feel like that great, bad bear is after me!”

Toone was one of 70 people who went voluntarily to Van Nuys--one of five such Los Angeles-area collection sites--answering the IRS’s plea to “join, or rejoin, the tax system.”

Like many others, Toone said she didn’t file federal income tax returns for the years 1990 and 1991 because she didn’t have the money to pay taxes. She said she has received only disability payments, the result of a heart ailment that waylaid her two years ago. The IRS examiners, she said, kindly asked her to return with more documents before they can tell her how to proceed with repayment.

Eric Yost of Sherman Oaks said he didn’t file a return for 1991 because he was unsure of what exemptions he could take. “This is a big weight off my shoulder,” he said.

As for others who showed up at Van Nuys and the other centers the IRS opened for six hours Saturday--in Los Angeles, Arcadia, Compton and Culver City--the reasons for not paying taxes ranged from procrastination to fear of prosecution, officials said.

But, as IRS spokesman Robert L. Giannangeli pointed out: “The IRS has never filed a criminal action against anyone who comes in on his own and files a correct return.”

He added that the IRS will offer those who didn’t file returns another such day of atonement--Saturday, Sept. 26--at the same locations except Arcadia. But thereafter, he said, the IRS will intensify its efforts nationwide to track down those who don’t file returns.

In most cases Saturday, IRS examiners and volunteers from the American Assn. of Retired Persons helped wage earners--and even a few who are small-business employers and self-employed--work out payment schedules for amounts typically between $1,000 and $2,000 per return, said Andy Kahn, an IRS examiner.

A handful, she said, even learned that they are owed refunds of as much as $300.

“The most overriding problem,” Kahn said, “is that too many people aren’t having enough withheld from their paychecks. But then, maybe that’s a sign of the economy we’re living in.”

A 38-year-old Los Angeles man named John--who chose to give only his first name--said he owes $3,000 in taxes for the years 1989, 1990 and 1991. He sat for more than an hour at a table where Kahn carefully scanned returns he submitted Saturday for those years.

He said he owes an additional $1,800 in penalties, adding that he has arranged to settle his tax debt with $300 monthly payments.

When John finally rose from the table, Kahn smiled and told him, “Congratulations!”

“I’m totally relaxed now--a big level of stress is gone,” John said moments later, adding that he probably could have paid his tax obligation when it was due.

“But then, I would have had absolutely no money to allocate elsewhere,” he said, explaining that he had been laid off for 11 months in 1991 and was barely able to pay the medical and funeral expenses for his mother, who had died the year before.

At the Van Nuys center, the mood was decidedly non-threatening. IRS employees and volunteers were casually dressed. They worked at four tables strewn with soft-drink cans, pencils and stacks of papers, but no computer terminals were in sight.

High on a nearby wall hung a framed color photograph of a smiling President Bush, very much in keeping with the mood of the day. Has a “kinder, gentler IRS emerged?” someone asked IRS spokesman Giannangeli, himself clad in white tennis shorts and a red golf shirt. Is it kinder and gentler than the “great, bad bear” Toone had feared?

“Only for the time being,” he said.