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Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS by Richard Yancey. HarperCollins, 2004, 695 pages.

The Taxman Cometh Clean

by Mike Holmes

The "Confessions of a . . ." literary genre has long been a popular format that entices readers by promising an inside look at some mysterious and usually disreputable profession, like Mafia hit man,or prostitute, or soldier of fortune or other career choice which average people rarely have firsthand knowledge about. Richard Yancey's "Confessions of a Tax Collector" is no exception. Tax collection, like butchering animals or gathering foreign intelligence on WMDs, has remained shrouded in mystery, and for good reason. Sausage makers and government spooks do not want you to share their secrets.

Yancey's book does a credible job of giving us a look inside the IRS Beast (Yancey's term). It is both less and more than the typical insider account of an unsavory profession. There is plenty of salacious action: mild-mannered, middle-class tax collectors come across as pretty sexed up, and Yancey claims pressured taxpayers regularly offer sexual favors as bribes. But what makes this book distinctive is that it manages to achieve a degree of literary merit.

Yancey came to the IRS as a scrawny, 135 lb. weakling with an English degree and a string of failed careers. His real ambitions were literary, and his literary talent is evident as he paints a vivid picture of the first three years of his often terrifying twelve-year descent into the bizarre world of tax collection. He tells how he (and other) IRS agents intimidate taxpayers into filing and paying taxes, and when they cannot collect, how they barge into their homes and businesses, hauling away cars and trucks, emptying bank accounts, and stickering everything in sight with bright notices warning citizens that their property now belongs to the federal government.

In 1991, Yancey answered a blind newspaper ad in central Florida. It promised college graduates with at least a 3.5 grade point average "interesting and rewarding careers." The ad led to a well-paying but despised IRS job as a point man for the "voluntary" tax system. His job consisted of showing taxpayers who were reluctant or unable to pay just how "voluntary" the system really is. His skeptical fiancee wasn't supportive, and his friends from community theatre were horrified. He quickly was alienated from the civilian world, much like a newly recruited Marine or policeman. The IRS veterans derided him as a "pansy poet" (though he isn't gay) and predicted he'd soon be gone.

Yancey manages to present himself as a sympathetic protagonist despite his working for the most despised agency of the government. This is a genuine literary accomplishment, achieved by detailing the progress of his career while presenting himself as different than the insider career-climbing clerks or ex-military types typically hired as R.O.'s (Revenue Officers). Yancey is one of the first of a crop of "Distinguished Scholars," who are hired solely on their demonstrated academic success rather than any knowledge about taxes or ability to bully others successfully. Most of this book centers on the severe and weird year-long training internship designed to turn him into a loyal IRS functionary.

Readers looking for revelations of IRS tradecraft won't be disappointed. Yancey skillfully weaves into the tale many interesting tidbits about, and insights into, the IRS's collection process and the paramilitary mindset of its collections officers. His accounts of paranoia and bureaucratic infighting within the collections offices are even scarier than the things they do to taxpayers. Readers come away with even less confidence in their privacy and in the security of their assets. But they get some small solace in the emotional and psychological price the tax collectors themselves pay for their pitiless intrusions.

The book is full of anecdotes, among them his encounters with tax protesters. He develops a specific hatred for them, especially the promoters of the "untax" movement; and his account of how the IRS squashes their misguided efforts is must reading for libertarians.

What makes this book extremely readable is that it consists almost entirely of reconstructed dialogues between Yancey and co-workers,friends, or taxpayers, and interior monologues which reveal Yancey's often panicked state of mind. While the author mentions several times his 4 a.m. writing sessions before work at the local Denny's, I have to wonder just how accurately these 8-to-12-year-old conversations are rendered, especially with Yancey's claim that all names and identifying details have been changed. The book jacket tells us that his interactions with taxpayers were all conducted under a self-selected IRS pseudonym, as is common practice, yet nowhere in the actual book is this mentioned. In his reconstructed dialogues, everyone refers to him as "Mr. Yancey." He reports considerable career success, and yet we learn nothing about the final eight years of his service in the Treasury Department.

At one point, he shares a detailed account of how he picked up a wounded dog that had been struck by a hit-and-run driver and left for dead, and heroically rescues the animal despite the owner's indifference. This story, I suppose, serves to demonstrate his charitable moral fiber, but seems so self-serving and irrelevant as to be merely annoying.

Aside from a brief mention in the afterword, where Yancey claims the mid-90s Republican Revolution put severe restraints on R.O.'s with the list of "Ten things that can get you fired" (this was originally, by the way, 30 things), he doesn't deal with many of the changes in the IRS since the early 1990s. The number of field-collection R.O.'s has been cut by over two-thirds, and recent massive IRS reorganizations have doubtlessly made much of his description of the bureaucracy obsolete.

There are plenty of former IRS employees now in civilian life, many of them now representing taxpayers. Some have written similar insider accounts. The IRS functions in three large segments: tax return processing (mostly clerical and data processing), tax return examination (the dreaded audit process, partly by automated methods, partly by trained accountants and attorneys), and the collection process, which, according to Yancey, requires virtually no knowledge of business, tax law, or anything else we usually associate with the IRS. All it takes is a strong stomach and a thick skin, plus a willingness to become part of a dysfunctional bureaucracy full of backstabbing coworkers and managers who spy on their employees.

"Confessions of a Tax Collector" was much more enjoyable than one would expect, given its subject. And if you can justify its purchase as an "ordinary, necessary and reasonable" expenditure for your business, you may even be able to write off the purchase price. But you didn't hear that from me.