The Agency We Love to Hate
The Internal Revenue Service. The last man standing in the fair-game field of PC punching bag punch lines. Power-trippers with green eyeshades, at www dot vampire dot com. The only domestic agency that violates the Geneva Convention. Muggers with No.2 pencils. The outfit everyone thought the NRA meant when it ranted about “jackbooted government thugs.” The folks who blight the week between Christmas and New Year with the 1040 mailer. The people who thumb through our fiscal intimacies to hoot about at the water cooler. The last official salutation any American wants to see, now that the draft has gone and taken “Greetings” with it.
Boy, I feel better, getting all that off my chest. (I also waited until I had aced my refund to say it.)
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If there’s one thing that can make a Democratic tax attorney sound like a Republican, it’s the IRS. Marilyn Barrett chairs the tax section of the California State Bar, and balances two practices in her Century City office: one for big clients with big money and big problems, and the other, free, for clients trampled roughshod by the cowboys of the IRS.
When she shows up at the IRS on behalf of the big guys, she gets the respect accorded an adversary with matching firepower. When she shows up on her own dime and her own time, they may sweat her out, test that do-good spirit. Once, she says, they dragged out for an entire day a matter that should have taken an hour.
Taxes, Barrett quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes, are what we pay for a civilized society. The asterisk is that some IRS staff “engage in conduct so mean-spirited as not to befit a civilized society,” locking its cross hairs on “the most vulnerable among us.”
When you handle $1.4 trillion a year, maybe “due process” comes to mean due, as in payable.
Katherine’s case got Barrett so ticked that she wrote to Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Katherine’s husband, a San Fernando Valley attorney, had embezzled thousands. But until he pleaded guilty, Katherine had no idea; none of it had shown up on their joint tax returns.
Even though Katherine had no role in the crime nor benefit from it, the IRS went after her for more than $300,000. The appeal officer said that she--a nurse--”should have known” that tax returns prepared by a CPA and her attorney-husband were wrong.
And a woman I know, aging and cancer-stricken, found that the IRS had issued a levy on her small bank account for taxes unpaid with her ex-husband nearly 15 years before. A levy requires 30 days notice, she said; you got notice, the IRS answered--in 1987.
Only when the intransigent officer in charge went on vacation did kindlier spirits in the IRS work things out. On such serendipities do whole lives hang.
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The peculiar culture of the IRS is a Petri dish for breeding bizarre and violent tax conspiracy theorists with more firepower than brains. The most notorious, Gordon Kahl, believed income tax is part of a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy to subvert white Christian America. He did not believe it alone.
Just as conspiracy weirdos are not the sum and substance of Americans, arrogant power mongers are not the alpha and omega of IRS employees. Yet their mind sets seem remarkably similar: secretive, insular, convinced that almost everyone else is up to no good.
Like traffic cops accused of writing tickets to meet quotas, IRS employees get kudos for the number of cases they close, and closing smaller cases is easier than closing big complex ones.
And like police internal affairs officers, public advocates within the IRS are suspect to their colleagues.
(We are not alone. Peru announced that citizens taken hostage in the Japanese Embassy at Christmas will have 30 working days after they are released--whenever that is--to file their 1996 taxes. It’s enough to make them go over to the Tupac Amaru.)
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The only IRS contact that millions of us have is the 1040 form. Just 1.17% of tax returns get audited, and the full-blown treatment--the sweating, bright-lights, third-degree audit--is 0.7%.
Those fractions don’t resonate in a country whose only shared national moments are payday and April 15--the day we make money and The Day we have to account for it.
Let’s undertake a modest experiment in participatory democracy. It’s an exercise in self-delusion, but they say any exercise is good for you.
Below that $1 checkoff box for political campaigns, let the IRS list 10 blank spaces for you taxpayers to write in what percentage of your tax money you’d like to go to where. Whose pork barrel to fill? Do you chip in for a Tomahawk missile, or the space shuttle? Pony up for half a Border Patrol agent? How much to the MTA, and how much for male birth control research? How about new jackboots for our government thugs?
Mine? Millions for the arts and sciences, and not one cent for mohair subsidies.
