Confessions of a Tax Collector (20 page)

I nodded. I started to tell him where it was, then thought better of it. Culpepper was speaking earnestly now. “Don’t tell anyone where it is. When you have to write a cash receipt, make sure no one’s around when you put the book away. I recommend putting it in a different place each time. And never, never leave your desk unlocked, even to duck out to the John.”

“You mean someone in this office would steal a cash receipt?”

“Oh, they wouldn’t take the whole book. Too obvious. No RO is that stupid. No, they flip to the middle of the book and tear out one or two receipts. That way, six months down the road, a year maybe, Gina’s doing your reconciliation and those receipts are gone. And I’m sure they told you what happens to you if a receipt comes up unaccounted for.”

I nodded. Instant termination. An official receipt from the IRS was proof that taxes had been paid. It was the most precious form in all the Service, Form 809. The book in which they came represented literally billions of dollars in blank checks.

“I can’t believe anyone in this office…”

Culpepper spread his hands, laid them palm down on the tabletop. He studied his nails. “I’ve known ROs who hire private investigators to tail their professional enemies. I’ve known ROs who have shredded entire case files. Is your desk unlocked at this moment, Rick?”

“Okay,” I said. “So we can’t trust the taxpayer and we can’t trust one another. Whatever happened to the Service being a brotherhood?”

He smiled, all his attention still focused on his manicure. He let silence smack the end of each sentence. “You are a trainee. You are vulnerable. You will never be more vulnerable than you are right now. We can remove you on a whim. We may decide you look funny. We may decide you smell bad. Your fellow trainees will—and are doing so, even now—try to turn us against you. While you are vulnerable, you have no allies. You have no friends. You are alone.”

He raised his eyes.

“Do you believe me, Rick?”

“I always believe you, Culpepper.”

“This is war. Surely this simple truth has occurred to you at some point in the past six months. You are at war,” he said. “All of us are. But it’s a war whose front is constantly shifting. Sometimes it’s before us, sometimes it’s behind us. To survive this war, you have to know which way to turn and fight. You have to hear the round coming.”

Indoctrination begins the moment you’re hired. On your first day, everyone hails your arrival with a hearty
welcome aboard!
as if you’ve just set sail on the U.S.S.
IRS.
You don’t go into training, you go into
basic training.
You are not an employee; you are
a frontline
employee. You do not go to your office; you go to your
post-of-duty.
You do not have work hours; you have a
tour-of-duty.
You don’t go to appointments; you go to
the field. This is war,
Culpepper had said. And Melissa:
If it was up to me, I’d line ‘em all against a wall and shoot them.
The language of war and the culture of conflict are the only means to prepare us for what is expected of us. How else could they demand what they demanded of us? You can’t take their life savings, their car, their paycheck, the roof over their head and the heads of their children, without dehumanizing them, without casting yourself into a role that by necessity makes them the enemy. We occupied the front lines, and there can be no front lines without a war. Like war, our jobs consisted of hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by moments of extreme terror. And, like war, it was addictive. Blood in the water of the fountains of Byzantium.
This is war.
In a moment, I would walk back to the main office, where my comrades-in-arms hunkered in their foxholes, typing levies or filling out lien requests or composing histories of their latest campaigns, covert ops, and full-frontal assaults, phones pressed close to their mouths, speaking with bankers, lawyers, spouses and former spouses, business partners and ex-business partners, current and former employers, parents, siblings, distant cousins, school principals, local cops. We have superior intelligence; we know more about our enemies’ lives than they know themselves. We know where they are. We know what they do. We know what they have. We will execute what they fear.

This is war.
Back at my desk, I checked each receipt in my 809 book, to make sure none was missing. None was. I slipped the book into an envelope and sealed it with tape. Now, no one could tamper with it without my knowledge. Measures and countermeasures.

This is war.
The room was empty but for Henry tapping away at the IDRS
[16]
terminal. Where was everyone? I knew Allison had gone to the field. Dee had called in sick—again. Rachel might be sitting in the interview booth. Perhaps if I sat there long enough, a senior RO, would breeze in and ease my mind with a war story. To talk about a particularly funny or memorable case was to tell a
war story.
I sat at my desk, not moving. Waiting for something. I had some calls to return, some histories to write, some notices to mail. I needed to check to see if Laura Marsh was indeed current with her payroll taxes—before Culpepper had a chance to do so. I needed to search for eight cases that “justified” a seizure.

This is war.
I picked up my pen. I opened my file drawer. I pulled a case at random. I felt no moral ambiguity at that moment. All I felt was rage and the bloodlust of battle. That little bitch was trying to sabotage me. I could stomach failing on my own merits. God knows I had done that often enough. What I couldn’t abide was thinking I might fail based on the treachery of another. I didn’t make up these rules. I didn’t write the Internal Revenue Code and I didn’t invent the culture that grew out of it. I scoured the file for anything I might seize. I felt more alive than I ever had. I felt like a teenager, falling in love for the first time. The chrysalis was tearing open. Within it, I was poised to spew.

I had lied when I told Culpepper I always believed him. Some of his stories seemed too pat; they had a mythical feel to them, like mini-morality plays meant to drive home a point. I doubted he ever lost all his hair, although a few years later I learned that there had indeed been a Service employee, a manager, whose hair fell out due to a rare condition exacerbated by the stress of the job. I suspected this story appealed to Culpepper because it illustrated how the Service, like the military, sought to break down trainees, strip them of their individuality, so they might be remade into… well, the image of William Culpepper.

I don’t know if a private investigator was hired in Florida to tail employees. I do know that years later an employee from the Knoxville office testified before Congress in the hearings that led to the passage of the Revenue Restructuring Act of 1998. She testified that a manager abused government time by sleeping with his secretary during duty hours. His employees had discovered this by hiring a PI, who had followed the manager and his paramour, capturing them on videotape checking into the Hilton across the street from the federal building, and in the parking lot of a popular restaurant, as the secretary mounted her boss in the front seat of the government-issued Ford Taurus, which constituted abuse of government property. The manager kept his job but was transferred to another city.

The Service is a closed society with its own language and customs. Once inside the Service, we were sealed off from the outside world and, for some, the rules of that world often had little relevance. Gina had been accurate when she told me that entering the Service could pose a serious threat to personal relationships that existed prior to joining it. The chasm is wide between the Service and the rest of society. This is not altogether the fault of the IRS. No one likes paying taxes and those with whom we dealt
really
didn’t like paying taxes. All dreaded our knock on the door, our voice on the phone, our letter in the box. Everyone we met just wanted us to go away.

Sexual banter was commonplace in our post-of-duty. It relieved the unrelenting pressure of our jobs. As the training year went on, the remarks became more graphic, the line between banter and harassment redrawn, until few topics were taboo. Our relationships in the “real” world had little bearing on how we behaved in the office. Married or single, once inside the beige-colored walls of the federal building, we were citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, indulging in innuendo with all the gleeful abandon of adolescents.

“Jesus,” I said one day. “This is about the sixth abatement I’ve done this week.”

“Rick loves to abate,” Allison said.

“So does that make him a master abater?” Rachel asked.

Flirting served another purpose, closer to our emotional cores: it affirmed our common humanity, for we were still green, finding our balance; we were not yet accustomed to the schizophrenic nature of our lives. We needed assurance that we were still attractive, desirable, worthwhile people, and flirting was the straightest line between the two points. Even Gina was not above it. Once, in the middle of the work area, with several RO’s present, I asked her a technical question. She invited me to sit on her lap while she explained the answer to me.

When I related this incident to Culpepper, feigning outrage, he said, “You know, this may be difficult to believe, but when she first joined the Service, Gina was one hot babe. Weighed about thirty pounds less, hair down to her ass; all the men were hot for her. I’ve got some pictures from a office party I’ll show you sometime. She was damn good, the way she discriminated: she wouldn’t go for just anybody. Then she got married and that ruined her.” He did not define what “ruined” meant. “Anyway, you can report her for sexual harassment if you’d like. The Service does have a policy against it.” He said this with a perfectly straight face. “But that might cause certain… repercussions to your career.”

Revenue officers and their supervisors, who were once revenue officers themselves, understand power. If they did not, they would not be revenue officers for very long. In our Byzantine world, sex was just another expression of power, another weapon in our arsenal. Culpepper told a story about a manager who set her sights on an RO who was a poor performer. She spent two years gathering enough documentation to justify his removal from the Service. At the last moment, he came forward with an accusation that she had demanded sex in return for her dropping the case against him. It was her word against his, but the Service wanted to avoid any public embarrassment: he had threatened to take his story to the newspapers. As the most hated agency in the federal government, perhaps in the free world, the IRS constantly strives to avoid anything that would give the public more ammunition to despise it. Management backed off and the RO dropped his complaint. He continued to work for the same manager as if nothing had happened, and never lodged another complaint against her.

During our phase training, a story made the rounds of some female trainees being pulled from class by a division chief and his subordinate, a branch chief. They were taken to a meeting room at the hotel where the training was taking place. The doors were closed behind them. The women were directed to chairs arranged in the large circle in the center of the room. The division chief made a speech. He said the training period for revenue officers was the most important part of their career and if they wanted to succeed, they must learn the vital lessons of trust and bonding. “Without one another you are doomed to failure,” he told them. He was going to lead them in a trust exercise. He turned to one of the women in the circle and said, “Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever had sex?” She was too surprised to answer. Someone else laughed, thinking this must be some kind of gag. It was not. He asked the question again and she stammered, “Nowhere. I’m a virgin.” The room broke up. The tension left the air. Everyone reached a tacit agreement that this
was
some kind of joke. The division chief said, “Oh no, I’ve heard about you. Everyone’s been talking about
you.
Come on, tell us the weirdest place you’ve ever done the nasty.” He went around the circle. Some gave honest answers. A closet. A swimming pool. On a rooftop. In an airplane. The answers grew more ridiculous as the spirit of the exercise caught on. In a church pew. On the escalator at the mall. If anyone was made uncomfortable by this bizarre ritual, she did not let on. The branch chief asked the next question: “What’s the weirdest position you’ve ever used?” When no answer was forthcoming or not sufficiently graphic, he pressed for details. This dragged on for over an hour. The division chief asked the woman who had made love in a pool if she would mind going for a swim after the day’s session. It was all conducted in a casual manner. Nobody objected. Nobody acted offended. The ones who were troubled held their tongues: they were not striving to be revenue officers because they had a burning desire to collect taxes; they were striving to be revenue officers because they had a burning desire to put food on the table. One of these trainees—the first to be questioned by the division chief—slept in her room that night fully clothed, with furniture stacked against the door. She quit the following week.

Normal boundaries can break down quickly in an environment where the most mundane task has the potential to alter irrevocably the lives of others. Culpepper wasn’t the only one in the Service with a God complex. Each day, a revenue officer makes dozens of decisions that have life-changing consequences. The majority of the revenue officers I knew during my career found ways to keep this in perspective, but some became convinced of their own invulnerability. They begin as mere mortals; they end as Olympians. And, like the Greek gods, they would screw anything and everything with an orifice. A female revenue officer is reprimanded after being caught performing fellatio on two of her coworkers during duty hours. Another female RO, who is married, regularly works from a hotel room, so she can spend quality time with her lover. She gives out the hotel phone number to taxpayers in case they need to reach her. Her husband discovers the affair and is arrested for attempted murder when he tries to smash a chair over her head. The husband of another RO confronts her manager in the office, chasing him around a potted tree while the manager screeches for someone to call security. An agent with the IRS criminal investigation division suspects her husband (also an IRS employee) of having an affair. She bursts into his office one day and begins rifling his drawers. When he confronts her, she pulls her gun and tells him if he doesn’t confess, she U blow his brains out.

A district director for the IRS is forced out of his job when his secretary reports he sodomized her on his desk. Once this story hit the papers, the Service quietly moved the former director to another state—picking up his moving expenses—and paid him a six-figure salary to analyze statistics until he was able to retire. The secretary’s sexual harassment claim was settled out of court—with a binding confidentiality agreement. The matter disappeared from the papers.

“Rick.”

I looked up, startled. It was Gina. She was wearing a black sweater, a black skirt, and a glimmering ruby and onyx ladybug suspended just above her right breast.

“Did I scare you?”

“No, just your stealthy appearance.”

She laughed. She pulled up a free chair, sat down, and said, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, working.”

“Aren’t you coy. Which cases are you closing today?”

I started to mumble a reply. She interrupted me. “Are you closing
any
cases today?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Have any appointments?”

“No, I—”

“Good. I’m bored.”

The office was practically deserted. Henry and Bonny were in. The rest had signed out to the field or had taken leave. All revenue officers were required to sign out in the office log. The Service always wanted to know where to find you. On most Fridays, revenue officers signed out to the field, for obvious reasons. Culpepper was in Orlando, meeting with the branch chief. He had finally gotten his wish: an assignment as acting manager for a training group hired six months after our class came on board. We were no longer the new kids on the block. Culpepper was preparing the new-hires to move to their digs, across the alley from the federal building, into the same ten-story office building once owned by my father. Culpepper was technically still a revenue officer, but it had been made clear to him that he would be promoted as the permanent manager of the new group—if he proved himself. Come on,“ he said the day he got the assignment. ”Let me show you my new office.“

Culpepper had already hung his awards and a print of
The Scream
by Edvard Munch on his new office’s wall. He was ebullient.

“It’s the perfect setup,” he said. “Six trainees, fresh from the street. Not one of them over the age of thirty. None have worked for the government before. I’m like a sultan with a harem full of virgins, Yancey.”

“Lucky you,” I said.

He leaned back in his executive chair and put his feet up on the desk. “I know I’m sort of bailing halfway through your training year, but Cindy’s okay. You know enough now not to let her poison you. Just enforce. Enforce, enforce, enforce. It’s the only thing anybody notices. If she tells you not to enforce, enforce anyway. Gina will back you up. Bust your ass. I don’t expect to be in this job very long. I’ll be the branch chief by the time you’re ready to move into management. Impress me, and in another five years you might be sitting in this chair.”

He folded his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

“I always knew I’d be here one day,” he said softly. I had the impression he was not speaking to me, though I was the only other person in the room.

Gina was rocking slightly in her chair, watching as I placed a hand over my case history to hide it from her. I wasn’t sure why I was hiding it from her. “Let’s go to the field,” she said. “Do you have anything for the field?”

“Well, I—”

“A good RO always has something for the field,” she said.

“Well, then, I am sure I could—”

“Good. Grab the cases.”

She breezed from the room. I looked over and saw Henry sitting at his desk, staring at me. He called over, “Uh-oh, boy, you in trouble now.” He came over, leaned on my desk, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “You know, I didn’t want them to hire you. I said it from the first; you remember it was me and Gina who did your interview? Soon as I heard you were an
actor,
I thought, Uh-oh, this gonna be trouble.”

“Why’s that, Henry?”

“‘Cause nobody ever gonna know when you’re real.”

“But how does that mean trouble?”

He hissed, “She’s gonna try to take you to the house.”

“What house?”

“
Her
house, dummy.”

“Christ, Henry,” I said.

“You wait. You’ll see. ‘Lemme show you my house,’ she’s gonna say. You watch out for that woman, Rick.”

“Why, Henry?”

“Because she’s evil. She’s one of those, whadya call, Witchins.”

“Wiccans.”

He nodded vigorously. “You hit that nail right on the neck. You hear that story about the cat? Well, she didn’t give that cat away—she sacrificed that cat. Bit its head off with her teeth. At one of those, whadya call, Black Mass.”

I nodded. “Right, Henry. Black Mass.”

“Just watch yourself, Yancey. It don’t take no genius to see those handprints on the wall.” He walked back to his desk and commenced to fussing with some papers, chortling to himself. Henry rarely talked to me, and when he did, I rarely had a clue what he was talking about. I dug through my file drawer and found three cases that had some potential. One was an unable-to-locate account, always good for some door-banging. Another was a missed deadline to file some income tax returns. I grabbed some blank summonses from the forms cabinet. “Oh-ho!” Henry snickered behind me. The third case needed first contact, but I was still within my thirty-day window. I double-checked my briefcase for the necessary forms: Pub One, Forms 433-A and 433-B, blank 941s and 940s. I ran to IDRS and pulled printouts of all three accounts. I was forgetting something. What was I forgetting? I would never succeed as a revenue officer if I didn’t learn to keep my head in a crisis. Why this surprise attack by my manager? Had Culpepper said something to her? Had Allison? She had not suggested we go to the field on a whim. Gina did not suffer from whims.