Confessions of a Tax Collector (8 page)

He finally interrupted her. His cheerful, commanding veneer was wearing thin. He was frustrated that she refused to speak to Marie, the one person in the office who could clear up the matter in minutes.

“May I ask why we’re going into all this right now?”

“I’m trying to figure out who is responsible for paying the taxes.”

“I’ll save you some time. I am. I’m responsible.”

“Because we’ll come after you, too.”

“Come after me?”

“You personally. You. Your assets. Your stuff, like that Rolex on your wrist right there. We can assess the taxes your business withheld from the employees against you personally and seize your assets.”

“You are—you’re going to seize my Rolex?”

“I didn’t say that. I said we could, if we have to.”

“Believe me, you won’t have to.”

Melissa shrugged. She returned to the payroll records. Bernie Craig abruptly rose from his chair and sped from the room.

“What’s the matter, is he sick?” Caroline asked.

He returned in a moment with a manila folder that he slapped in front of Melissa.

“I should have thought of this right away,” he said. “See, we’ve already filed the fourth quarter. We filed it early, and here’s a copy. See? Everything matches.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Melissa said. “Why have the deposits dropped?”

“Your question is moot. We don’t owe anything.”

“I can’t leave here until I know. You said yourself your payroll is usually higher in the fourth quarter.” She slapped the ledger book closed.

Bernie Craig blinked rapidly. The smile was completely gone now. The tie was loose around his neck. He seemed to have developed a twitch in his left hand; his buffed fingernails slid back and forth across the varnished table.

“I don’t have an explanation,” he said slowly. He appealed to us trainees silently with his devastatingly blue eyes. “All I know is this is the tax on the return and this is the total of our deposits. We don’t owe anything for the fourth quarter. That’s all I know.”

“But I know what you said.”

“What I said?”

“I know you said you paid bonuses in the fourth quarter, but on this return the liability is actually lower than the third quarter.”

“Okay. I’ll grant you that.”

“And so I have to know—why?”

“Maybe we fired somebody. Maybe somebody got demoted. Like I said, I don’t handle personnel issues.”

‘But you are aware of the bonuses.“

“Bonuses?”

Melissa heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Did you get a bonus last year, Mr. Craig?”

“Yes.”

“And the other partners?”

“Of course.”

“You’re a lawyer, you’re pretty smart, you gotta understand what I’m getting at.”

He nodded. I watched him nod and was glad he understood, because I had no idea what she was getting at.

“And I take offense at the suggestion, Ms. Cavanaugh.”

“I’m not trying to offend you. I’m trying to get an answer to a simple question: Why did the taxes go down and what part of those taxes reflect these huge bonuses?”

“Now wait a minute. That’s two questions, and I never said the bonuses were huge.”

“Well, I guess there’s only one way I’m gonna find out.”

She reached into her briefcase and I watched as Bernie Craig’s tan bled from his face. He looked like he was going to be sick.

“This is a summons to appear before me, in my office, and produce the complete bank records for the business for the last three months of 1990,” Melissa said as her hand flew across the form. “If you choose not to appear and do not file a motion to quash in federal court, we will enforce the summons before a magistrate, at which time if you still choose to deny us the records, we will throw you in jail for contempt.”

“First my Rolex and now jail time? Jesus Christ, the return shows we don’t owe anything!”

“Exactly,” Melissa said. “And the Service wants to know why.”

I expected him to come over the table at her, but he rallied the charm instead. He acquiesced, promising to deliver the bank records precisely on his appearance date. Somehow, Melissa had beaten him down. He was ready to be led to the wall. He was ready for the blindfold.

On the way back to the office, Rachel asked her, “So what did you do before you worked for the IRS?”

Melissa shrugged. “Finished high school.”

We spent the majority of “pre-Phase” training in the conference room, plowing through the training booklet, or enduring incomprehensible lectures from Cindy and Melissa.

Melissa
:
“Documentation is everything. Document, document, document. If it isn’t in your case history, it didn’t happen. If it didn’t happen, you didn’t do it. If you didn’t do it, you failed to do it.”

Cindy:
“We work with two basic kinds of assignments: TDAs and TDIs. TDA is Taxpayer Delinquency Accounts—the tax has been assessed and you must collect it. TDI is Taxpayer Delinquency Investigation—no returns have been filed and you must secure them or verify they don’t have to be filed. The easy way to remember it is TDA means money and TDI means returns.”

Melissa
:
“Shred every day. Shred everything. And don’t let your shredding pile up in a drawer. Never leave anything on your desk with taxpayer information on it. That’s disclosure. Disclosure will get you into big trouble. And be careful around that shredder. It’s about four hundred fucking years old and it will suck your fingers in, rip them right off your hand. Kick better be real careful. A revenue agent leaned over to grab a stack of Paper by the shredder and it ate his tie. Almost pulled his head into the shredder.”

Cindy:
“Remember the three Cs in ‘collection.’ Cause, cure, compliance. Cause: What did the TP do—or not do—to fall behind or not file? Cure: What can the TP do—or you do—to bring the taxpayer back into compliance? Compliance: Is the TP current? If it’s a business, are the owners current? Is every entity they have an interest in current? Check everything, across the board.”

Melissa
:
“Always make demand. Demand, demand, demand. Don’t write in your history: ‘Asked TP to pay.’ Always write,
‘Demanded
full-pay.’ That’s how I begin every history: ‘Issued Pub I
[2]
and demanded full-pay.’”

Cindy:
A lien is automatic. It arises as a matter of law after the tax goes unpaid for ten days. A
Notice
of Federal Tax Lien is a document filed in the county courthouse that perfects our lien, the lien that already exists… out there. Out there in, I don’t know, limbo somewhere. A lien is not a levy. Sometimes a TP will call in and say, ‘You put a lien on my bank account!’ No, you placed a
levy
on his bank account. The NFTL
[3]
. attaches to everything; a levy is specific. Bank account, wages, savings, tangible assets— that would be a seizure, though it’s still a levy. Seizures are levies but not all levies are seizures, though technically we are seizing the actual money in the bank account. The lien grabs anything and everything the taxpayer owns now or in the future, but it doesn’t do anything with it. The lien just sits there, at the courthouse, letting everybody know we’re in there, like a mortgage or a judgment, but those people have to go to court to enforce their interest; we don’t. We just go in and levy the assets under the authority of our lien. Though you don’t need a lien down to issue a levy to a bank account, say, or someone’s wages, because the statutory lien is floating around out there. So don’t get confused about liens or levies. Levy, lien. Lien, levy. You’ll get it straight.“

At home, Pam asked how it was going.

“I really don’t know.”

“What do you mean? How can you not know?”

“I don’t know because I don’t have a clue what we’re doing.”

“Rick, why are you wasting your time with this? You’re like an elephant taking flying lessons.”

I decided to ignore the remark. “How many Cs in collection?” I asked.

“What?”

“How many Cs are there in collection?”

“Two.”

“You’re wrong. In the IRS, there are three Cs in collection. And did you know that a tax lien floats around in limbo, that there’s a purgatory for tax liens? Then you have your liens that don’t float. They stick. Stick and grab. Sticky, grabby liens, leeching onto everything you have.”

“I hate taxes,” she said.

“I’m staying at least through Phase One.”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“But they’re paying me a helluva lot of money just to sit there and be bored and confused.”

“Okay. I can see the appeal of that.”

“Are you coming with me to Tampa?”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

“It might be fun.”

“Look, Rick, you chose to get into this. I told you not to and you did it anyway. This is your gig, not mine.”

“Just a suggestion. I’ll only be home on the weekends, you know.”

“Fine. But if I find out you’ve screwed any of those weirdos, I’ll super-glue your dick to your leg.”

JANUARY 29, 1991, IRS TRAINING CENTER, TAMPA

Byron Samuels, Chief of Collection for the Jacksonville District, opened Revenue Office Unit 1 Basic Training with these remarks:

“I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome all of you on board. This is an exciting time for the Service, the most ambitious and massive hiring initiative we’ve ever undertaken and I know you won’t disappoint us.”

We were sitting in a large classroom, two to a table. Caroline was my tablemate. She had brought a plastic hotel cup filled with grapes with her. For someone so thin, Caroline was constantly eating. Seated directly in front of us were Rachel and Allison. Dee sat in the front of the room beside one of the new-hires from Tampa. The majority of the trainees in this room were fresh from college, making Rachel and me two of the oldest people in the room.

“When you return to your PODs
[4]
in March, you will have forty cases sitting on your desk waiting for you. You’re gonna feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, and, some of you, very, very afraid. By this time next year, if you trust the statistics, half of you will no longer be employed by the Service. But I promise those of you who will be, as a former RO myself, if you stick with it, if you hang on through the training year, you’ll find this the most challenging and rewarding work you could ever hope to find. I guarantee that. The first few months are gonna be tough. We make them tough, because we want tough people in the job. We want bright, yes. We want ambitious, yes. But we also want tough. We want tough because without tough our entire government collapses.”

Byron Samuels was about sixty, with a bone-white crew cut and thick horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and speaking barely above a whisper. He was a living legend within the Service. Brilliant, mercurial, eccentric, he once told his managers, “You gotta get out once in a while or you’ll go nuts. I’m never hanging a manager out to dry for jumping into the car every now and then and doing ninety on the highway.” A devout teetotaler, he cursed like a sailor in private meetings, we heard, often berating his underlings until they fled the room in tears.

“Basic Training will teach you the fundamentals of the job,” he said. “The mechanics. That is, the ‘how,’ not the ‘why.’
Why
do we do things the way we do them? Because our tax system is based, in theory at least, on self-assessment and voluntary compliance. That’s the first two rails of our system: self-assessment and voluntary compliance. They are interrelated, in that you can’t have self-assessment without voluntary compliance and you can’t have voluntary compliance without self-assessment. I suppose, being 3.5s, you all can guess what the ‘third rail’ of our tax system is.” He flashed a smile. “Enforcement. You. Without you, our system collapses. Because no matter how fair the system is, no matter how much resources and energy we pour into education and taxpayer service, there has been and there always will be a portion of the population who will not pay.” He smiled again. This smile lasted at least fifteen seconds. “So. Make ‘em pay.”

Sam Mason, our lead instructor, had been with the Service for fifteen years. His reputation was sterling as a technician and scandalous as a playboy. Even in the brisk Florida winters, he favored Hawaiian shirts that displayed his copious chest hair. He liked to brag that he never slept. In 1981, before the advent of airbags, he slammed his car into a light pole, suffering severe injuries to his head and neck. Those who knew him before the accident said the portion of his brain that governed personality had been permanently damaged. He spent his evenings, after the bars closed, at a twenty-four-hour restaurant, where he drank coffee until dawn and hit on the waitresses. Several clerks now with the Service owed their jobs to Sam Mason. He considered himself a creative person or, as he put it, a “right-brainer in a left-brained job.” He painted. He sculpted. He wrote poetry. During the second week of Phase One, he drew me aside and said, “I hear you’re a writer. I want to show you something.” He pulled a tiny square piece of paper and carefully unfolded it. “It’s better if you read it aloud,” he said. “But probably not a good idea in here.” It was an erotic poem to his latest conquest. The first lines ran: “As I lower my face / Between your widespread thighs.”

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. He seemed eager to hear my opinion. “I really struggled with that second line. I had ‘betwixt’ before I changed it to ‘between.’ Don’t you think ‘betwixt’ is too archaic?”

“You don’t hear it very often,” I said.

“But you hear the phrase, ‘betwixt and between.’ What the hell does that phrase mean anyway? So you like it?”

“You know,” I said. “Emily Dickinson used to fold her poems into tiny squares like that.”

“Really?” He seemed thrilled he had something in common with Emily Dickinson. “Didn’t she try to kill herself or something?”