Confessions of a Tax Collector (28 page)

This may be funny to you, buddy, but it’s not funny to me. I told you I was going to get you a check.
But I didn’t get a check.
Well, there’s no way I can get you one now.
How come?
Because you put a lien on my house!
You missed your deadline.
Because the bank won’t loan me money.
Why?
Because you put a lien on my house!
We can release the lien once you pay us.
I can’t pay you until you release the lien.
I’m not going to release the lien.
And I’m not going to pay you the money, you sonofabitch!
And Toby, laughing at this,
Man, that reminds me of the time a taxpayer sent me a gift-wrapped box of shit, with this note that says, “Thought you might like the one thing of mine you forgot to take.”
And Beth, saying she could top that, telling the story of the man who exposed himself to her and said,
Thought you might like to suck this dry, too.

Feed the beast. November 19,1991, Form 795, Revenue Officer R. Yancey, RO ID 5901-XXXX, Total Dollars Collected: $5,678.14. November 25, 1991: $10,981.74. December 9, 1991: $8,431.43. Feed the beast. Shouting out totals at the end of the day. Mark “O” for office contact, “F” for field, “C” for closure. Fill it up with Cs. No time to write the histories; clean ‘em up when you’re ready to close. This one needs hours of research for an abatement. Fuck it. Deny the request and let ’em file a claim. Put the burden back on them. We have no problems; the taxpayer has the problems. Enforcement closes cases. Find the pressure point and push as hard as you can. Close the case. Feed the beast.

Keep a good calendar. If you don’t keep a good calendar, you’re screwed. File this lien today. Send this levy. Refer this summons. Seize the car. They’ll drop like ripe apples from the tree if you enforce. Give extensions, accept excuses, put off contact, and watch the dust collect on the file. By the time their case comes to you, they’ve had their chance. We’ve written, we’ve called; we’ve threatened, begged, negotiated and wheedled. Nothing left to do now but enforce. And don’t beat the bushes trying to find them. Find a levy source and slam ‘em. They’ll by God return your calls then. Find the pressure point. Feed the beast.

The days grow short, the sky dark by six, and you, after a quick meal from the drive-thru, writing case histories at the kitchen table, just to stay above of the rising tide.
Look at you, fool,
Toby says.
Billy C. jumps somebody’s bones in a hotel room and you afraid they won’t keep you? Don’t you know by now for every case you close they give you two?
Driving to work, startled by the wreaths hanging from the lampposts, why the hell have they hung the Wreaths so soon after Thanksgiving? Then you realize it’s almost Christmas and you haven’t bought a single gift. Advent lends a particular urgency to the cause: in another two weeks the moratorium hits. Gotta get the levies out. Gotta file the liens. Can this seizure wait? Two weeks after January 1 comes the final review. What will they look at? Dollars collected? Cases closed? Seizures? Culpepper:
Don’t fear anything, but if you must fear something, fear incompetence. Over one hundred thousand people work for the Internal Revenue Service, making it the largest employer in the federal government. During filing season, we scrape them off the sidewalk and drag them through the doors, hand ‘em a calculator, and say, “Congratulations, you work for the IRS!” Remember that. The truly dangerous revenue officer isn’t the one who knows what he’s doing. The RO people should really fear is Henry, who couldn’t find his own ass with a pickax and a shovel.

Force them to exhaust the equity. Give us our lien interest and maybe we’ll give you a payment plan for the rest. Sell it or get a loan on it. Borrow the cash from your parents, your children, your brothers and sisters. You’re in our house; you will play by our rules. Ours is a monopoly; it’s not as if you can go to the IRS down the street for a better deal.

The weather turns raw, like the nerves in the interview booth, beneath the poster on the wall that reads, under a glowering photograph of the man,
Only an accountant could nab Capone.
Babies wearing floppy knit hats, bouncing on laps, little fists slapping the table. Trash fires in rusting bent barrels on the cracked slab where the mobile home lists, a ship aground. Stately homes in quiet cul-de-sacs, beautiful, intricate death masks disguising financial demise. Peeking in windows, brushing back cobwebs. Squeaky doors, leaky roofs, drained swimming pools where leaves slowly rot in stagnant water. Sitting in overstuffed sofas while the family dog watches suspiciously from the corner. Openmouthed children, squawking parrots, morose fish listless in algae-encrusted tanks. Ancient grandmother, wheelchair bound, withered fingers combing thin paper-white hair, staring balefully from the corner. Flaying open, stripping bare, performing autopsies on kitchen tables, countertops, the hoods of cars, in open garages, wind biting through thin socks. They need time and there is no time. They need money and there is no money. Culpepper:
Here is the imponderable. The taxpayer claims he has no money to pay the tax. The Service claims the tax money was there and used for something else. This is the underlying philosophy behind all enforcement: “You took the people’s money and now the people want it back. You can either give it back voluntarily or we will take it from you forcibly.”

Pilots, shoe repairmen, doughnut-shop owners, dog groomers, sweatshop operators. Stacked three deep in the waiting room. So much humanity flooding through the doors we’re interviewing in the hallway. On cold mornings, steam rises from the lake downtown like the mists of Avalon. We Floridians feel betrayed by cold weather. It fills us with righteous indignation. A Christmas tree appears in one corner of the waiting room, in open defiance of the First Amendment. Someone has placed, among the empty boxes wrapped as presents beneath the tree, a plastic Nativity scene bought on clearance from WalMart. This one’s a fifty-three. This one we’ll seize after the first. Close this one as Unable-to-Locate. Transfer this one; dump it on another district.
Another quality closure!
Walking three blocks in the biting wind to the bank to convert the cash collected that day. The IRS is both recipient and remitter. There is something bitterly ironic about this. Almost there now. You didn’t live through this year only to falter at the end. You must not stumble this close to the finish line. Next year your salary jumps by almost $10,000. You can buy a new car, pay off that credit card and the student loan. Maybe even get married, as remote as that possibility may seem. You are what you do, and you are a revenue officer. Almost.

“Rick, I’m leaving.”

“But we haven’t even ordered yet, Rachel.”

She laughed humorlessly. We had just been seated at The Silver

Spoon, one of the few restaurants downtown, where Cuban sandwiches and chicken with yellow rice are the specialties. Our thirty-minute lunch break had become a prize jealousy guarded. It was our one opportunity in these last, hectic days of the training year to catch our breath. Rachel was not faring well. Dark circles ringed her eyes. For two weeks, she had been nagged by a persistent cough. Her sick leave was all but exhausted. Her desk was directly behind mine, and there were times when I turned around to say something to her and saw her sitting motionless in her chair, staring into space.

I’ve found a job taking subscriptions over the phone. Sort of like sales, I soft pitch. You know how I got the job? I told the interviewer I was trained to sell a product everyone despises.“

“I’m sorry, Rachel.”

“No, I’m sorry for all of you.”

Gina met privately with me after the holidays. She offered her congratulations and gave me my final review. I had qualified for the Sustained Superior Performance Award based on my overall rating of “Exceeds Fully Successful.” In just one year, she reminded me, I could compete for the promotion to Grade 11. “This promotion is the only freebie you get,” she said. I had jumped two grades, from Grade 7 trainee to Grade 9 Revenue Officer. “The next one will be tough. With a territory this small, there’ll probably only be one Eleven available. You’ve got a year to prove to me it should be you.” She did not add, “And not Allison.”

She didn’t need to.

The trainees met for drinks after work. We reminisced, trading oft-repeated war stories. Allison talked about her dream of interviewing a taxpayer while she was naked. I asked Dee what that dream meant, since she was the psych major, and she countered that, as Freud once said, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. I did not tell them about my dream. In it, I am arguing with the cabinetmaker that the law requires me to place the teddy bear under seizure. I have already written its description on the 2433 and to give the bear back would be a logistical, bureaucratic nightmare.
One stuffed bear, approx. 24 inches in length, missing right eye, slight tear on left ear.
The fair market value of the bear is $5.42.I tell the taxpayer we will accept our lien interest, or approximately $3.25.

We toasted ourselves. Our jubilance was tempered only by our exhaustion. Dee said she felt as if she was being released from prison. We looked at each other and shouted in unison: “Gina’s cat!”

The hour grew late. We were reluctant to part. When we returned next week, we would no longer be trainees. We would be revenue officers.

As I left the bar that night, dreading home and my erstwhile “fiancee,” now practically a stranger to me, I thought of that day during our first week, when Melissa took all five of us with her to seize the contents of a deceased taxpayer’s safe deposit box. A disgruntled heir had tipped her off as to its existence. I remembered the startled look on the bank manager’s face as we trooped through the door, a battalion of new recruits, wielding the full force of federal law, and how her hand shook when Melissa handed the forms to her. We followed her into the vault and watched silently as she slid the box from its chamber and set it on the table in the center of the room. She stepped back, wavering by the door. Melissa told her she didn’t need to stay. “I think I probably should,” was the answer. Melissa opened the box and began lifting out the contents, one by one. She separated the items into two piles: sentimental and saleable. We stood in a semicircle around the table and watched as she carefully inventoried each item. Melissa wrote on the 2433, “One diamond solitaire ring, yellow gold, approx. one-half carat.” We trainees watched, acolytes attending the high priestess as she pawed through forty years’ worth of a stranger’s keepsakes and treasures with all the detachment of a surgeon removing an appendix. We had been granted admittance to this chamber because we were agents of the American people, acting on their behalf, endowed with a sacred trust. The significance of the moment was not lost on us. The carrier door opens and we explode from our cage, careening around the room, free.

The call came two weeks after my initial receipt of the case of Paul Goodings d/b/a
[30]
Goodings Heating & Air. As with all new cases, I had immediately sent the final notice, giving the taxpayer thirty days to pay the amount in full or suffer the consequences. Usually, this notice was ignored: the type of debtor we dealt with did not respond to written notices from the Service. If they did, they would not be our type of debtor.

She sounded out of breath, as if she had sprinted to the phone from the mailbox. Her name was Alicia, and she was Paul Goodings’s wife.

“I handle all the books,” she explained.

“Are you on the payroll?”

“I don’t take a salary or anything, if that’s what you mean. But I handle all of Paul’s billing and payables. He’s just too busy, and frankly he doesn’t have the head for it.”

Neither do you, apparently.
I had become accustomed to this little interior voice, an echo of Culpepper’s, the bitterly satisfying mockery, the inevitable cruelty borne in the heart of the player who always holds a royal flush. I hardly noticed it anymore.

I explained to Mrs. Goodings that the tax was assessed against the business and her husband, not against her. Under the law, I could not discuss anything with her.

“But, Mr. Yancey, I just told you, Paul doesn’t understand any of this. He won’t be able to answer any of your questions.”

“Is there a separate bank account for the business?”

“Oh yes. We keep everything separate, business and personal.”

“Do you sign checks on the business account?”

“No. Our personal stuff is joint, but Paul signs all the business checks… but I write them all. I write out all the bills when they come in and he just signs the check. I handle all the money, Mr. Yancey, so Paul won’t even know what you’re talking about.”

I believed her. She had yet to catch her breath and spoke barely above a whisper. I believed her—and understood perfectly.

I said, “Where is the bank account?”

She told me.

“And is there enough in there to write me a check?”

“No. No, see, that’s why I was calling. We’re going to need a little time—more than the thirty days. Actually, I was calling to see if there was anything we could do to arrange a payment plan.”

“Mrs. Goodings, I can’t discuss anything like that with you, unless Mr. Goodings is present or designates you as his power-of-attorney. Is Mr. Goodings there right now?”

“No. No, he’s on a job. It’s really all he can do to keep the jobs coming in. Honestly, Mr. Yancey, just tell me what you need from us and I’ll get it to you.”

“What I need right now, if you can’t send me the check, is to talk to Mr. Goodings.”

“I just told you he can’t talk right now!” she said sharply. Panic was beginning to set in. I closed my eyes and could picture her cupping the phone to her ear, her entire being focused on the receiver, willing me to acquiesce.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mr. Yancey. Things are just not very good right now. He’s got so much on him. You wouldn’t believe how much he has on him and this will—you have no idea what this will do to him.”

“I’m sorry, too, Mrs. Goodings.”

“Please, call me Alicia.”

“But I really can’t talk to you about—”

“If you could just give me five minutes of your time, I could bring in all our information and you’ll see there’s nothing we can do unless you give us a payment plan.”

“I can only discuss the case with Mr. Goodings or his power-of-attorney. Do you want me to send you a power-of-attorney form to sign?”

“No. Yes. Oh, God, I don’t know!” She began to cry.

“You should tell him.”

“Tell him? Tell him what?”

“Tell him about the letter.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure you do, Mrs. Goodings. You have some time.” I checked my calendar. “Sixteen days.”

“What happens then? What happens on the seventeenth day, Mr. Yancey?”

“Read the letter.”

I hung up. I wrote in my history, “TPW CI resp to L1058. Advsd cldnt disc case w/her. Must have POA or TP prsnt. Scrd LS. TPW advs hndl all bkkping for TP and didn’t hve fnds to FP. P.O.A.: lvy bnk acct if no FP at end of not. pd.”
[31]
I closed the case file and wrote in my calendar: “FC Goodings.” A field call (FC) was required before recommending a seizure, and I was hoping to catch Paul before he started on his repair calls. Paul Goodings had no idea he owed over $13,000 in payroll taxes. Apparently, only two people knew: Mrs. Goodings and Revenue Officer Rick Yancey.

Culpepper had explained the principle this way:
It is not a level playing field, Because it is not a game. The government takes the collection of its debts very seriously.

The Internal Revenue Code grants the revenue officer powerful tools to accomplish the Services mission, which is, no matter how many times it is reworded over the years, to collect the tax, to get the money, to feed the beast. These tools give us an extraordinary advantage over our adversaries. This is why ROs like Henry manage to hang on to their jobs despite having almost no technical expertise or the slightest bit of sophistication: the law gives us H-bombs to take out anthills.

Alicia Goodings didn’t give me a chance to make my field call.

“Is this Rick Yancey?” she asked after I answered the phone, as I always did, “Internal Revenue Service, Rick Yancey.”

I told the caller I was Rick Yancey.

“Good. I was hoping I could get you before you left for the day. I’m Paul Goodings.”

“You’re… excuse me, did you say you were Paul Goodings?”

“Yes. I am Paul Goodings. You’ll have to forgive me. I have a very bad cold.”

She faked a sneezed into the phone.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just got back to the shop and talked to Alicia. She showed me this notice.”

She wasn’t thinking clearly, obviously. If she had thought it through, she would have “given” the phone to herself quickly, after giving permission for me to discuss the case with her. Or him.

“I’m glad you called, Mr. Goodings.”

“Please, call me Paul.”

I stifled a guffaw. “Okay. Your wife tells me you don’t have the cash to pay me right now.”

“No. No, to be honest with you, I don’t. What I’d like to propose is payments of five hundred dollars a month.”

I explained I couldn’t discuss “his” proposal without seeing a complete financial statement.

“The best thing to do is meet so we—”

“Meet?”

“Yes. Set up a time for you to come in.”

“I’m just swamped right now, Mr. Yancey. Can’t you just send the forms to me and I’ll fill them out and send them back?”

It was like an episode from
I Love Lucy,
except it was more pitiful than funny.

“I understand. Well, I can meet you at the shop. Just give me a good—”

“No, I’m always on the road. Unless you want to meet with Alicia.”

I explained I couldn’t meet with Alicia unless he, who happened to be Alicia, was also there. But then of course I couldn’t meet with just her either, but both of her. The her who was Paul and the her who was… her. I explained what a power-of-attorney was. I wondered if she would jump at this opportunity to commit forgery. I suspected more than one check had been signed by the feminine side of Paul Goodings.

She didn’t jump. “I just don’t want you to do anything in the next couple of weeks.”

“She doesn’t know, does she?” I asked Alicia playing Paul about Alicia.

“Who?”

“Alicia. Your wife. She doesn’t know you owe this money.”

“Sure she knows. She handles all the books, I told you that,” said Alicia, playing Paul talking about Alicia.

“Actually, she told me that.” I was better at playing the game than she was. “Maybe you and she can talk about it tonight and get back to me within the next couple of weeks. There might be something you haven’t considered.”

“Something like what?”

“Borrowing the money from relatives or friends. Using a nonbusiness asset to pay the tax. Skipping some payments on other debts. You know, the Service moves a lot quicker than a bank when it comes to foreclosure. Now, under the law, I can’t do anything for another sixteen days.” For an instant, the wicked thought of putting her on hold while I transferred her to my manager seized me. I would pick up the phone and pretend to be Gina. I pushed the thought away and now it was my turn to hunker over the receiver and will her to acquiesce.

“I promise I won’t do anything until then,” I said. “And I’ll even think about giving you a courtesy call before I take any action.”. I explained I was often in the area and he could expect me to drop by at any time within the next two weeks.

· · ·

The check for full-payment arrived in the mail the following week. I don’t know where she got the money, but I suspected her husband never discovered he owed federal taxes. If he had, he would have called me. I did not make a history-entry in the case file after our second conversation. In a way, I was protecting both of us. It might raise questions about why I played along and did not confront her, why I didn’t play it straight. Then the check arrived in the mail and made my omission irrelevant.

Gina enjoyed hearing this story during my monthly DIAL briefing. The issue of omitting the history-entry did not come up; rarely was Gina interested in the contents of a history. Her chief compliant about most ROs was their lack of composition skills. During our training year, she lectured us, “A history sheet is not the place for your personal opinions.” She told the story of an RO, whom she had fired, who opened every narrative with a discourse on the grooming habits of taxpayers or discussed the condition of their house.
The house stank. It was very dirty. I was afraid to sit on the sofa. The taxpayer did not smell good.

It was one of the few light moments during that particular review. Gina was in one of her darker moods. A new branch chief had taken over duties from Jenny Duncan—becoming our third chief since we had come on board—and Gina did not like him, thought him hopelessly out of touch with the field, and sincerely believed he was giving Annie DeFlorio and her training group next-door in the Wesley Building preferential treatment. She was not the only one dissatisfied by the regime change: Jenny Duncan had filed suit over the selection, claiming sexual discrimination by Byron White, the head of the collection division. Gina had asked me what I thought of the new chief, a former collection analyst from the New Orleans District named Bob Campbell.

“He seems like an equitable person,” I said.

“Equitable? I don’t think you can apply that word to a person.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not a term applied to human beings.” She sounded very sure or herself and she was my boss, so I chose not to argue.

“He gives her everything and the only thing he gives me is grief,” she said of Bob Campbell and Annie DeFlorio. “I know what it is. Nobody else in the branch has the guts to say it, but I’ll say it: she’s young, attractive, tall, and
thin.”
She held forth for another five minutes about Annie DeFlorio. No one in the history of the district had risen as quickly into management. As a revenue officer in Orlando, she had the most closures, the most seizures, the most fraud referrals. During branch meetings, she snacked on cheese crackers and drank Mellow Yellow. “It’ll destroy her kidneys,” Gina said. “Give her stones the size of tennis balls.” While in college, she had worked at Disney World, which might account for Gina dubbing her “Snow White.” Annie DeFlorio was in the Wesley Building, just across the alley behind our office, but Gina rarely talked to her in person. If circumstances forced her, she would pick up the phone or fax a message.

Gina complained Campbell was skimming the best accounts and giving them to Annie’s group to close, thus making us look bad. Annie had even reopened some of our old closures, written off as uncollectible, and found money where we claimed there was none. This had produced bad blood between her and Annie, and between us employees. We were resentful that Annie’s trainees received only ten cases after basic training, as opposed to our thirty-five. That they had two of the best OJIs in the district jobbed in for their education. That they were being spoon-fed their inventory, with little pressure to close cases, a practice that had, ironically, produced more closures in their group. In a district where success was measured by dollars collected and cases closed, the pressure had become enormous on Gina to keep pace with Annie DeFlorio, and our DIAL reviews began to reflect this.

“Why is this still open?” she asked of one corporate case.

“I don’t have any leverage,” I answered. “He’s a curb layer, you know, installs curbing in new housing developments. All he needs to do his job is this curbing machine.”

“And he hides it from you?”

“He owes more on it than it’s worth.” Under the Code, the IRS cannot seize assets with no equity.

“Receivables,” she said.

“He works only one job at a time.”

“So issue a summons to him for the name.”

“He’s finished the job by his appearance date and then swears he doesn’t have any pending. We’d look pretty stupid in court if—”

“Levy his bank account.”

“I have—twice. Each time, he’s overdrawn.”

“Vehicles?”

“Brand-new truck, fully encumbered.”

“Children.”

I laughed. I was the only one laughing. I stopped laughing.

“Impress upon him settling up for the good of his family.”

“I think he’s divorced.”

“Get the divorce decree.”

“Actually, I’m not sure if he’s divorced.”

“This review might be more productive if you were better acquainted with your inventory, Rick.”

“He’s not divorced. I remember now. Separated, no kids.”

“Are you speaking off the cuff?”

“No, I’m on the cuff.”

“Everyone has something we can exploit,” she said. “A pressure point.”

“That’s why the case is still open, Gina. I’m still looking.”

“Follow him to the job site.”