Confessions of a Tax Collector (24 page)

Dead silence. We had not spoken his name in weeks. Even Beth, who was the closest to him, had kept mum.

“Billy has not been arrested. He has not been fired. His reassignment is pending.”

“Is he coming back to the group?” Cindy asked.

“He’s got at least one offer on the table and he’s taking some time off to weigh his options. Things have been blown way out of proportion. And we all need to remember that there are always two sides to every story.”

Culpepper never told me his side of the story. It would be nearly two years before I would see him again, and then under circumstances that made the past irrelevant: He was no longer my OJI, we had both moved on. He had found his niche as I had mine. The most commonly accepted version of the events that led to his downfall was this: The new training group was attending Phase One in Daytona Beach, staying at a hotel two miles from the ocean. Culpepper decided to join them for a week, to better acquaint himself with his new group. His wife remained in Lakeside. There was a particular trainee, a young woman fresh from college, who had become infatuated with him, or at least pretended to be infatuated with him—she was also the most ambitious of the new-hires. She flirted shamelessly with Culpepper, had lain on the beach with him as the group sat around talking and drinking beer. She laughed at his jokes and even began calling him “Billy” during happy hour at the hotel lounge.

No one but Culpepper and the trainee know what really happened next. According to the trainee, Culpepper drank too much and made a pass at her. She rebuffed him. Later, as she was getting ready for bed, a banging commenced on her door. She heard Culpepper calling for her, demanding that she yield and allow him in. She was so frightened, she said, that she locked the door and hid under her covers, literally shaking with fear. A far cry from the rumors we had heard in Lakeside.

Culpepper would claim the opposite: that she had invited him to her room and “chickened out” at the last moment. Her story was made up to cover her embarrassment after things got too serious.

Nevertheless, two weeks later, William Culpepper was no longer the manager of the group.

* * *

They said he camped in his office and refused to pack in preparation for Annie DeFlorio’s arrival. The branch chief called him and ordered him to pack up his things and move back to the federal building. Culpepper refused. The division chief called Culpepper and ordered him to move. Culpepper refused. “You want my job, come and get it,” he reportedly said. The branch chief arrived in Lakeside on orders from on high, driving from Orlando with Annie DeFloria in tow. “I’ve brought you something, Billy,” the branch chief said. The secretary stepped into the room with three large cardboard boxes. “Time to pack up,” the branch chief said. Culpepper protested the accusations against him. He had been wrongly accused. He suspected the trainee was being coached, was being used as a pawn by unknown forces to destroy him. He never entered the trainee’s room. He just knocked on the door. He had made an error in judgment. He was the victim here. The branch chief was unimpressed. Culpepper was nothing to him. Annie DeFlorio, on the other hand, was a rising star. Her credentials were impeccable: honors in political science, former senator’s aide, outstanding revenue officer. It didn’t matter that the trainee refused to press charges. It didn’t matter that Inspection had recommended no official disciplinary action, calling it a he-said, she-said case. What mattered was Culpepper had made the fatal error of applying the old rules to a new paradigm: these trainees had entered under the Outstanding Scholars Program, as had we—as had Annie DeFlorio. In the span of five years, Culpepper had become a dinosaur, and the Service was hastening him and his kind toward extinction. A coup had taken place in the halls of Byzantium. The prince of power had lost his throne.

* * *

Cindy summoned me to her office after the group meeting. On her desk lay the cabinetmaker’s case file, a Form 668-B
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paper-clipped to the front.

“I’ve reviewed the case, Rick,” she began. “And I think we should talk about this before we give the file to Gina.”

“Okay.” I thought of Culpepper’s warning about Cindy:
Cindy was trained in another state. You have to understand that enforcement is not uniform across the country. Some districts seize, some would rather have bamboo shoots stuck under their fingernails. Cindy has the highest overage
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in the group because she never seizes. But if you want to be promoted in this district, you must seize. Cindy will try to stop you.

“Don’t you think ten days to get current is a little unreasonable?” she asked.

“Gina didn’t.”

“I was asking what you think.”

“He’s pyramiding taxes, Cindy. The manual is pretty clear on this.”

“The CIS says he has five thousand dollars in equity. He owes twenty-five.”

“But there is equity. And the manual says—”

“I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years, Rick. I know what the manual says.”

“Well, then.”

“You also told him you wouldn’t do anything for thirty days.”

“Only if he got current. He didn’t. I need to seize on this case, Cindy.”

She leaned back in her chair and regarded me. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “Why? Because it’s the right thing for the case or the right thing for your career?”

I didn’t answer.

“Ten days isn’t even enough time for him to talk to the bank,” she said.

“Is that our concern? In another month, Cindy, he’s going to owe another five or six grand. How long are we going to allow him to bleed before we put an end to it? You’ve seen the P-and-L
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. The guy hasn’t made any money since he opened the business. Whether we give him ten days or fifty, things aren’t going to change.”

“We’re doing him a favor.”

“That’s right.”

“I wonder if he’ll feel that way.”

“Since when do we give a damn about that?”

She relented and initialed off on the paperwork, but attached a cover memo to Gina, giving her reasons why we shouldn’t seize. We both knew it was a pointless exercise. Gina had been trained in Florida, where seizures were the usual means of resolving a case. She signed the 668-B that same day. I scheduled the seizure for nine a.m. the following morning. We would arrive with the locks and chains without giving any warning to the taxpayer. Assets—and taxpayers—have a way of disappearing when people know we are coming.

Toby, in his never-ending quest to transform Henry from desk jockey into five-star field officer, would tell him of the glory days. “Man, when I first started I had three hundred cases. Three
hundred
cases, Henry, and you didn’t need no manager’s signature on the B
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to seize. You didn’t need no consent. You drove around with the seizure kit in your trunk and you locked ‘em up on first contact. Any given day you had twenty, thirty, forty seizures going. You had to. There was no other way to stay on top of three hundred cases. My point is, you don’t know how good you got it. All you got to do now is seize every month. One seizure a month, Henry, that’s twelve seizures a year. You tellin’ me you can’t do twelve seizures in one year?” And he would say, “Henry, you’re afraid of your own inventory. You think you’re helping these people by not seizing them? People
thank
me when I seize ’em. They send me cards and letters. Once this lady sent me a bundt cake.”

“I don’t like bundt cake.”

“You don’t like bundt cake? Jesus, Henry, the bundt cake ain’t the damn Point! Most times these people are hugging a dead dog. The dog is dead and stinkin‘ in their arms, but they can’t let it go. They love their damn dog. They fed it and played with it and took it for walks and it’s part of them. But it died and it ain’t our fault it died and they need us to pull the stinkin’ carcass out of their arms so they can get a new dog, a puppy to give ‘em the love they need.”

“You crazy, Toby, you know that?” And Henry would laugh.

“You got to be cruel to be kind,” Toby answered.

* * *

I rose at 4:00 a.m. the next morning. I showered, shaved, brushed my teeth twice, and put on the only suit I owned, the same suit I wore to my final interview with the IRS. I had trouble with the tie. Culpepper had one suit he wore to every seizure, a navy blue, with a blue-and-red-striped tie. He even had a special pen that he used to sign all the paperwork. It was possible to obtain windbreakers embossed with the Treasury logo and the letters IRS on the back. No one wore them. Culpepper said it would be like conducting a seizure with a bull’s-eye drawn on your back.

By 4:45, I was sitting in my favorite booth at Denny’s on Highway 92, halfway between where I lived and where I worked. On any other morning, I would have my writing binder with me, and would work until 6:45, six cups of coffee and a half pack of cigarettes later. On this morning, I walked in with the cabinetmaker’s file. Beatrice delivered my coffee, black, and a glass of water. “Good morning, professor,” she said. She always called me “professor.” I studied the file as the earth rolled toward the sun. Dawn came cold and overcast. It was mid-November. I had just turned twenty-nine years old. I had been a trainee for eleven months, after being practically nothing for the past eleven years. The Service had hired me for this day, had trained me for it, had done everything within its power to prepare me for it. Thousands of hours, reams of training materials, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had put it off long enough. It was time to execute the Fourth Protocol. It was time to feed the beast.

I checked to make sure I had the proper forms. Form 668-B, Form 2433, Form 2434-B. A blank consent-to-enter. Phone numbers to the towing company, the locksmith, the local police. A copy of the tax lien. A copy of the final notice. I studied the CIS. I reviewed my history making sure I had documented Pub I, my deadline and warning of consequences.
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If he refused consent, there would be no seizure on this day; I would have to return to the office and prepare an affidavit for the court to grant a writ-of-entry. I sipped my coffee, smoked, and made notes. A seizure is carefully scripted in the Internal Revenue Manual. We must say certain things, give the taxpayer certain documents in a particular sequence. Once I handed the B to the taxpayer, his assets were seized, or, more precisely, became the property of the United States government, as agent for the American people. If he tried to remove them, he was committing a crime called “forcible rescue.” I closed my eyes and imagined myself handing him the B, reading the paragraph in the middle of the form, requesting consent… no, I should request consent first, before giving him the B. If I gave him the B first and he denied consent, I would have to release the seizure immediately. I would put the government’s position in jeopardy and, more important, look like a fool. And
I must not look like a fool.

I slid out of the booth, light-headed from the coffee and cigarettes, and headed for the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face. I rinsed my glasses. I looked at myself in the mirror. I needed a haircut. I had a blemish on the end of my nose, on the very tip. Call me Rudolph. What sort of adult man still suffers from zits? I felt the same way I did as a seven-year-old child, when my parents made me wear a coat and tie to church.

At 6:49,I climbed into my car. I had finished my checklist for the office: warning stickers, Scotch tape, two padlocks, chain, two “knuckle-busters,”
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seizure tags
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for the jigsaws, the radial-arm saws, the tables saws, my 809 receipt book, a copy of the IRM. A light drizzle was falling. My old wiper blades screeched at me. Cindy Sandifer: “A good revenue officer never gets wet.” I made a mental note to grab the office umbrella on the way out the door. Highway 92 was already filling with commuters, ordinary people on the way to their ordinary jobs. On this morning, somewhere far outside our small orbits, the cabinetmaker’s and mine, empires were being born, Great fortunes were being made. Magnificent dreams were being forged in the fires of imagination. In boardrooms across the country, great enterprises were being launched. The fate of entire nations was being decided in the hidden chambers of the powerful. On this day, too, in this minuscule corner of the cosmos, one dream would die in service of another, if what I desired could be called a dream.

You can see it in their eyes,
Culpepper had said.
Oh, how they want to believe the dream. The dream, Yancey! And you can show them, in black and white, from their own records, how they haven’t made a dime since they’ve been in business, how they’ve lost every penny they’ve sunk into it. How every drop of blood and sweat and tears they’ve poured into this black hole they call a business has been a colossal waste of time, and it doesn’t matter. They are
entrepreneurs;
they’re living the American dream: they are the boss; they are the
man.
And it doesn’t matter one damn bit they’re mortgaged to the hilt, their kids are wearing hand-me-downs, they’re driving ten-year-old cars with the rear bumpers dragging the ground. You know, cars like yours. Doesn’t matter a damn bit the judgments filed against them, the liens, the collectors calling day and night. It doesn’t even matter that you can prove to them they could make a better living flipping burgers at McDonald’s for minimum wage. None of that matters. Only the dream matters.

* * *

The rain fell harder as I drove west. I cracked the window to allow the cigarette smoke to escape. I was smoking too much. A pack per day now. Pam would roll her eyes when I lit up and smack her fingers against the inside of her elbow, miming a junkie getting a fix. The rain spat through the crack in the window, dotting my pants. The ash grew long on my smoke; I raised it, an offering, toward the crack, and watched the draft suck it away, so quickly it seemed to vanish into oblivion.