8-2-2005
CONFESSIONS OF A TAX COLLECTOR:
One Man's Tour of Duty Inside
the I.R.S.
by
Richard Yancey
Published: 04 - 05 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 3 , Page 8
By JANET
MASLIN
Published: April 5, 2004, Monday
Correction Appended
CONFESSIONS OF A TAX COLLECTOR
One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the I.R.S.
By Richard Yancey
364 pages. HarperCollins. $24.95.
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The title of Richard Yancey's nonfiction exposé says it all. The author went to work for the Internal Revenue Service and signed on for enforcement duty, ''the job of taking people's houses.'' Now he is willing to reveal just how scary the I.R.S. can be. ''Drink a little too much? Seeing a psychologist? Had an abortion? Faking a disability? We'll know. And most of the time, we won't even have to ask.'' Thus Mr. Yancey explains the many-tentacled nature of secret I.R.S. knowledge, when it comes to both the legitimate taxpayer and the ''DB'' (I.R.S. slang for ''deadbeat''). Give an inspector your social security number, and he can all but name your classmates at nursery school. This is interesting material, and Mr. Yancey pays attention to the colorful parts: advice from colleagues, for example, that it is unwise to confiscate anything that is alive, unless he is ready to feed it. (Pet stores are not beyond the realm of confiscation.) But throughout the needlessly overlong ''Confessions of a Tax Collector'' -- a book that reveals, for example, that Mr. Yancey's favorite day is Thursday -- there is a prevailing sense of manipulation. It's hard to believe that the author signed on for this work without a book, movie or sitcom in mind. |
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Mr. Yancey is described here variously as a typesetter, drama teacher, playwright, actor, ranch hand, telemarketer and ''published author.'' (What he published was an e-book, and it was fiction.) So he was well suited to the anything-goes world of hands-on tax collection. But the stories he recounts here have a wild and woolly adventurousness that dates them somewhat. Mr. Yancey was hired in 1991, when what he calls ''the 'cowboy' attitude of the old days'' prevailed. The Revenue Restructuring Act of 1998 created a tamer atmosphere and cut back on the harassment and intimidation factors.
As a newly hired I.R.S. officer Mr. Yancey was subjected to a training video that offered a best-case scenario for this line of work. He describes it with the good humor that animates this book's best sections. Trainees watched a beautiful blond woman in a red dress as she walked purposefully into an office, carrying a satchel.
''Blond Woman: Mr. Pierce, I'm here today about the taxes your company owes.''
''Mr. Pierce: ''I don't like this, but I understand you have to do it. If only I had paid my taxes like I should have!''
Needless to say the Mr. Pierces of Mr. Yancey's experience were rare. Had they been more common, there would have been no need for another piece of training material he describes. It is a booklet, ''Assaults & Threats: A Guide for Your Personal Safety,'' with its title printed in bright red ink. Among the tips here: ''Consider ending the interview if the taxpayer remains hostile.'' And: ''Remove objects such as ashtrays, staplers and other taxpayer files from the room when interviewing a taxpayer in an I.R.S. office. Sit near the exit so you can escape if trouble occurs.''
The possibility of trouble might have been threatening to I.R.S. employees, but for a writer nothing could have been more welcome. So Mr. Yancey describes a run-in with an angry dentist. (''If he can pull teeth he can pull a trigger,'' a colleague warns.) He cites the attitude of this government agency toward certain professions. (''Lawyers,'' another co-worker remarks. ''We like to catch 'em quick.'') And he writes about how he himself prompted a Florida newspaper headline reading, ''I.R.S. AGENT ASSAULTED DURING SEIZURE.'' But a first seizure of property, he tells readers, is like a first kiss.
With incidents like these Mr. Yancey clearly has the makings of an informative and interesting account. But he chooses to boost his data with a lot of peripheral I.R.S. office drama. So the reader will learn about flirtations, rivalries and back stabbings within the ranks, which is at least partly warranted: he wound up marrying a co-worker.
Still, the office characters do not loom as large as they might have, not even the diabolical enforcer who was Mr. Yancey's mentor at first, and who left behind a lingering impression.
It's not crucial to know that there are I.R.S. agents who get into trouble for covering their files with the remnants of potato chips. And in the end this internecine maneuvering is always overshadowed by the facts themselves. There's a whole book in Mr. Yancey's casual observation that if you drive down any street in America on a given day, half the businesses you pass will have tax trouble.
Mr. Yancey's ear for dialogue is good -- too good. He constructs long, chatty exchanges that he cannot possibly have remembered intact. He heightens all possible drama, from the smallest banter among tax agents to the piteous pleas of a woman about to lose her house. (''I'll return the jungle gym -- that's a two-hundred-dollar-a-month payment right there.'')
But if there's one area where he can't be doubted, it is in the realm of revenue-related rap. Surely he is right about having heard at a holiday party:
''With a lien and a levy and a seizure and a sale/We're devoted civil servants/And we hardly ever fail.'' For the I.R.S. of Mr. Yancey's tenure this was a way of saying Merry Christmas.
Correction: April 21, 2004, Wednesday
The Books of The Times review on April 5, about ''Confessions of a Tax
Collector'' by Richard Yancey, referred incompletely to his previous book, ''A
Burning in Homeland.'' While it was an e-book -- published electronically -- it
was also published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster.
Sunday, April 11, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
Tax dodger, meet tax collector
By
Nancy McKeon
The Washington Post
Some people define themselves by their job, some by their hobbies, yet others by their family relationships. Josh Kornbluth and Richard Yancey are two very different men who can be defined, at least in part, by the Internal Revenue Code. Kornbluth is a West Coast writer-performer who, in his 20s, worked office jobs to pay the rent. At some point he dropped out of The System and, even though he temped for a tax attorney, didn't file tax returns for seven years. Yancey spent those same years in Florida, and he too bounced around from job to job, trying to be a writer. He wound up — until a few months ago — as a revenue officer for the IRS, spending his days going after people like Kornbluth. Tax dodger, meet tax collector. Kornbluth was in Washington, D.C., recently performing his monologue "Love and Taxes." Yancey was in town promoting his new book, "Confessions of a Tax Collector." Here, in this edited transcript, they interview each other.
Kornbluth: Your book is really a story about becoming a grown-up.
Yancey: Yeah, a coming-of-age story. The IRS just happens to be where I come of age.
Kornbluth: I picked up on that right away because, in my show, we're actually telling a very similar story. Although we are, like, point-counterpoint, as we're being set up here. But as you describe yourself, you're pretty much a slacker. (grins)
Yancey: Oh, yeah. I was a ne'er-do-well in the classic sense. If there was something to fail at, I could achieve that failure. By the time I got into the Service, I was 28 and I didn't know what I was doing with my life. I didn't have a life, I didn't know what I was doing.
Kornbluth: You were the antithesis of what you were about to become. It's as if the car thief became the repo man.
So what was the job like?
Yancey: It was a lot of things. In some ways it was a terrific job. We had fun, especially in the early '90s, before Congress ruined everything and put all these inhibitions on the IRS. (laughter) We had a blast, and every day was different.
Yancey tells of a married couple — apparently tax protesters — who owed about $20,000 after failing to file for three years. They had no real estate in their names. Their 1989 truck had a large note on it. Only a 1968 Chevrolet Chevette had no lien against it. No way was Yancey going to get the government's $20,000 by seizing that.
Yancey: But I thought, I gotta close the case, so I'll go out and get the Chevette. I knew where he worked, I knew he probably drove his car to work, and so I go there and was cruising his parking lot, three or four times. I can't find a red Chevette anywhere. Then I stop and I see this For Sale sign on a car. And it's a cherry-red '68 Corvette, not Chevette. It's a classic, in mint condition, worth back then, what, $70,000? $80,000? Within 10 minutes I had a tow truck there. The guy comes running out of his office, and the tow-truck driver says, "If he's got a gun, you're my human shield. Stand there!" Anyway, we hooked it up, we took it in. I didn't get to sell it, though — the guy came up with the money.
It kind of illustrates the real lesson I learned in the IRS.
Kornbluth: Which is?
Yancey: Which is how to control and manipulate people, which really didn't have anything to do with the power of the federal law that I had behind me. It had to do with learning how to push people's buttons. What I learned was: First you find what they love, and then you take it. If you can't find what they love, find what they fear and exploit it.
Kornbluth: In your book, the (IRS interviewer) asks you, Why do people pay their taxes? You give the "right" answer, which is due to their patriotic duty. And he says, No, it's fear. Is that where it comes down?
Yancey: That's my experience. I can't tell you how many people, when I knocked on their door, said, "Are you here to arrest me?" And when everything was done, they would say, "I can't believe a person from the IRS is, like, a human being."
But when you were going through this ordeal, how were the IRS people in general? Were they the typical, you know, pocket protectors?
Kornbluth: I didn't actually — what I did was, I called. First, I avoided.
Yancey: That's common.
Kornbluth: At first I was working almost entirely at jobs that had withholding tax. I filed, and I got refunds, but then someone told me I was supposed to itemize because I was also writing freelance. And I couldn't: I looked around and everything would look like a deduction (laughter), and I didn't know how to deal with it. Not only that, but I couldn't find things — under socks, or KFC boxes.
So anyway, I just fell out of the system. I had an appointment with a tax person, a preparer, and on April 15, I was scrambling and then I just overloaded and I got really sleepy —
Yancey: Sleepy?
Kornbluth: Yeah, sleepy. And I needed to lie down on my receipts, and when I woke up it was the 16th. Just like that. And I just couldn't — it was late — and then, nothing happened.
Yancey: Nothing happened?
Kornbluth: Nothing happened. And so I continued to let nothing happen for seven years, until I was a secretary for a great tax attorney. And I was doing a show about, in part, how I hadn't done my taxes for seven years, and he said, "That was a very funny joke, Josh," and I said, "Well, it wasn't a joke," and he flipped out and sent me to a tax lawyer. And that's why I started dealing with it and going inside the system.
I wasn't trying to get away with anything. The tax lawyer said that if I had filed I would've gotten refunds. But then I made a little money, for me a lot of money, $50,000 over two years 'cause I had movie options for my monologues. And then, instead of another refund, I owed $27,000. So, at first I just wasn't thinking about it. Then I was thinking about it; it was on my mind all the time. I had been filing for years and then I stopped. So I eventually called the IRS, and they were really nice. I was on hold a lot, but I will say that, the music on hold, I found very relaxing.
Yancey: (laughing) Really?
Kornbluth: But as I put in my Social Security number, my heart was pounding and I thought, "What is that person going to say, like, 'You're going to jail'?" But at the same time, I really had the inkling — and I'd be curious from your end — the inkling of, I owe this. (laughter)
Was it your experience, or did you have any connection with whether the money you were being sent to collect was a fair assessment of these people?
Yancey: I never got into that unless they brought it up.
Kornbluth: That wasn't your job, right? Your job is like, "Rick, go, get that money."
Yancey: No one ever called me — well, some CPAs would call me by my first name, but most people wouldn't. And I didn't even use my real name.
Kornbluth: Oh, that's right! So, that's something I wondered — so the woman I talked to on the phone was named Mrs. Williams —
Yancey: (to laughter) Yeah, right! ... We're allowed to do it. I mean, I worked with people like you, but I worked with some real bad guys. There are those who openly flouted the system, who were, like, 'I know I owe this money and I don't care, I'm just not going to pay you.' And plus questioning the legitimacy of the tax laws, just in general —
Yancey addresses some of the people he dealt with in his career, many of whom seemed never to have had anything and yet wound up owing the IRS thousands of dollars.
Yancey: Most of it came about through self-employment, where people are basically living beyond their means, they're not thinking when they get a check that part of the money belongs to the government.
Kornbluth: Yeah, independent contractors, the self-employed, need to put the money aside. People like us, who are not by nature responsible, not dedicated to details, need to learn that. That's what I did. I didn't attend to it, I didn't put the money aside, and then I owed it, and then it got bigger and bigger. But that's not the IRS's fault.
But the tax attorney was great. And I picked up a lot of the language, like the shotgun provision and the classical corporation ruling and the reverse double dummy maneuver.
Yancey: What's that?
Kornbluth: It had something to do with, you set up these sort of companies that are sort of — well, I'm not the person to explain it. Nonetheless, it's a maneuver, it's legal, or apparently, and it's a great name I like to use in my show.
Yancey: I guess a lot of professions are like that. You have your own language, your own culture. ... In the IRS we don't call taxes taxes. They're not taxes, they're modules.
Kornbluth: So you're not really dealing with tax evaders. You deal with module evaders.
Yancey: Right, module dodgers.
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March 5, 2004, 11:08AM
A disquieting thought: IRS agents are people
By STEVE WEINBERG
CONFESSIONS OF
A TAX COLLECTOR: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS.
By Richard Yancey.
HarperCollins, 384 pp. $24.95.
As the federal income tax filing deadline approaches, an insider's account of how the Internal Revenue Service deals with delinquent and dishonest wage earners might seem like a scary reading choice.
So who could have imagined a former IRS revenue officer would compose a memoir not only exposing the agency's inner workings but also offering humor, pathos and insights into the human condition on almost every page? Confessions of a Tax Collector is not just a superb memoir about working for 12 years inside IRS offices. It is a superb memoir, period.
Richard Yancey did not set out to become an IRS revenue officer. When he interviewed for the government job in 1990 at age 28, he felt desperate. Growing up near Tampa, Fla., Yancey came from an upper-middle-class family, graduated from college with an English degree, then tried a number of careers, including playwriting, acting, managing a convenience store and teaching school. Nothing panned out. He was living in the home of a widow six years his elder; they called themselves an engaged couple, but marriage never seemed realistic.
Yancey began thinking about finally establishing financial and emotional independence. The advertisement placed by the federal government for revenue officers listed a salary much higher than any amount Yancey had earned, so he applied.
The memoir opens with his job interview at the Tampa branch of the IRS' Jacksonville district. It is obvious from the first page that Yancey is an accomplished stylist. His eye for detail, his re-creation of dialogue, his ironic tone, his self-deprecation, all serve a memoirist well.
There are reasons for readers to feel nervous about the book, and not only because it demonstrates the power of the IRS. Yancey does not identify anybody by real name. He has altered personal histories and appearances of taxpayers, sometimes including gender. He has disguised his co-workers. He discloses that he has also altered chronology, "for clarity and to facilitate the narrative flow." He has relied on memory rather than contemporaneous notes.
Such practices can lead to exaggerations and downright inaccuracies. But there is something about Yancey's words that seem trustworthy. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, just as he sometimes gave delinquent taxpayers the benefit of the doubt -- especially a day-care operator whose case arises throughout the book.
Not so incidentally, Yancey's memoir morphs into a love story in its final section. Late in his career at the IRS he helps engineer the ouster of a supervisor. The new supervisor is Annie DeFlorio, smart, successful at work and physically beautiful. She is a private person, but eventually her subordinates learn she is going through an ugly divorce. Yancey becomes infatuated with her, despite his knowledge that romances within the IRS are taboo. He finally works up the courage to ask her on a date to the theater. What happens after that is worth knowing, but I have decided against spoiling the ending.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance journalist in Columbia, Mo.
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The grisly facts on taxes
REVIEWS BY STEPHANIE SWILLEY
Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS
By Richard Yancey
HarperCollins, $24.95
384 pages, ISBN 0060555602
Already dreading having to send a check to Uncle Sam? BookPage has the perfect book to inspire you to get started on those tax returns. Explore the weird world of the IRS in Richard Yancey's Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS and we promise you'll never miss a tax deadline again.
Yancey, an English major who took seven years to graduate from college, tells the bizarre story of how he went from actor wannabe to Revenue Officer (don't call them tax collectors) after answering a newspaper ad on a whim. A sarcastic, tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy, Yancey fit right in with his first boss (a suspected Wiccan priestess) and training officer (a certifiable body building fanatic).
Not surprisingly, the IRS has a rule for everything, but the most important are these: #1 document everything and #2 shred everything. What is surprising is how workers get sucked into the system, learning to speak the IRS language of acronyms and numbers while losing the ability to think independently. As Yancey writes, the "system was designed in such a way as to completely remove our judgment from the process." Instead, Revenue Officers follow the four protocols: "Find where they are. Track what they do. Learn what they have. Execute what they fear."
The book is funny in a "thank God that's not me!" way, while at the same time being downright frightening. In the first case Yancey handled, he was faced with seizing the home of a down-on-her-luck daycare owner, and the cases only get more bizarre and pitiful as he uncovers child abuse and the mob. These guys are bullies, and you'll want to avoid a run-in with any of the slightly deranged, power-tripping tax hounds profiled here.
Booklist
Date: Nov 15, 2003
Author: Pitt, David
Yancey, Richard. Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty inside the IRS.
Mar 2004. 384p. HarnerCollins. $24.95 (0-06- 055560-2). 350.726.
David Pitt
With a title like a TV movie and characters that would be at home in corporate-world fiction, this memoir of "one man's tour of duty inside the IRS" is downright absorbing. The author, who always wanted to be a writer, spent 12 years as a revenue officer for the IRS.
He did all the things that make us despise the IRS: hunt people down, force them to pay their taxes, seize their property, destroy their lives. But, and this is just one of the surprising things about the book, he doesn't come across as a villain. He was just a regular guy doing a job he happened to be pretty good at. His colleagues, too, don't feel like villains-some were nice people, some go-getters, some corporate weasels, some benign bunglers, but, as the author presents them, they were nothing like the stereotypical, marginally satanic tax collectors you would expect to encounter inside the IRS.
In fact, the book itself is unlike what many readers might expect. It's written as well as any novel set in the business world-crisp prose, nicely detailed and with a well- developed narrative-and at its center, there's a core of moral uncertainty. It's OK to hate what revenue officers do, the author seems to be saying, because a lot of it is hateful-but necessary. An excellent, eye-opening book.
BOSTON Herald.com
'Confessions'
of a Tax Man: Author Suggests Fear of IRS Agents Is Justified
April 23, 2004 (Boston Herald) —
Feeling paranoid this tax day?
Do you think there are people at the IRS who are out to get you?
Fear that behind the bureaucratic bulwark there are men and women who delight in squeezing every possible cent from your savings?
Suspect there may be someone on the federal payroll who would actually take some perverse thrill in seizing your home for nonpayment of taxes?
IRS veteran Richard Yancey has a message in his recent book:
You're right.
Confessions of a Tax Collector - One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS is a tell-all about the agency Americans love to hate. It's laced with anecdotes gleaned during Yancey's years as a revenue agent -- government-speak for "tax collector."
Revenue agents don't merely determine what you owe. Their job, rather, is to make you pay up. And their power is incredible compared to that of agencies bound by more citizen-friendly rules of due process.
The 360-page book succeeds in humanizing the men and women who make their living making sure the rest of us cough up the cash. But it describes them warts and all. And the warts are scary indeed.
Yancey tells the story of one creepy manager who tells him he has become a "demigod" with the power to take away life savings, cars and paychecks.
We learn about a creature called a PDT, or Potentially Dangerous Taxpayer. Rest assured, though. Venting your anger at an IRS agent should not earn you this classification. Making threats, however, will.
Yancey also tells us about a few protections.
For instance: Because of the Fourth Amendment, you have to grant the IRS written permission to enter your property before an agent can seize it.
On the other side of the ledger, we learn about the senior revenue officer who talks of the unpleasantness people in their line of work see: "We come into people's homes for one reason: we aren't there to save the world," he said. So the senior officer tells his trainee (Yancey) that it would be against the law to report obvious signs of child abuse.
Not their problem.
We also encounter a certain level of self-awareness. "You're charged with enforcing the most unpopular laws in the country," a senior agent tells him.
But there are stories of mercy.
There's the divorcee whose day-care operation was taken despite her sobs -- but only after three years of second-chances.
There are also more brutal tales: A female supervisor addressed a soft-spoken cabinetmaker who'd fallen behind on payroll taxes.
"Why would you do that?" he asked.
"To put you out of business," she responded. "Do you think it's fair for you to operate without paying taxes while your competition pays every penny of theirs?"
So why would somebody enter this kind of work?
In Yancey's case, he needed money, needed health insurance and thought he was about to get married.
If this book has a shortcoming, it's that he does not go beyond the culture of the IRS to examine the difficult mandate it has been given.
Penning a memoir, he arguably had little choice.
But at least Yancey has given us an interesting and generally well-written look into the lives of the foot soldiers whose job it is to implement the tax code. So the next time you get the friendly call, "This is the IRS," you might at least have a little sympathy. Be nice to him to her.
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Ex-repo man for IRS tells it with a smile
Thrill of chase tempered by sad tales
by Carol Knopes
| Abr 12 '04
Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS
By Richard Yancey
Harper Collins, 364 pages, $24.95,
Confessions of a Tax Collector is an IRS recruiters' nightmare -- and a very funny book.
It tells the story of an English major so desperate for a job that he plunges into a cesspool of bureaucracy and ethical blundering as a tax collector. Or, more properly, an RO -- revenue officer.
It was a long way from Shakespeare classes for Richard Yancey, who says he worked as an IRS revenue officer for 12 years.
This book is his account -- admittedly, as he writes, with some license taken. "No name in this book, with the exception of my own, belongs to anyone I know. I have changed the names of all other characters and have altered their personal appearances and histories." He also points out this book is based on recollections. "I have relied on my own memory, such as that is, to reconstruct conversations. Throughout, however, I have striven to record the spirit of what was said, if not the actual words."
A revenue officer is the one who cleans out your bank accounts, tows away your car and takes your house -- if you haven't paid your taxes. This is not an accounting job; those are tax examiners. An RO, in short, is the repo man for Uncle Sam.
These are our tax dollars at work, and the entertainment value can take some of the sting out of paying them.
We follow Yancey through his training at a Florida IRS office, where every person he talks to -- including the recruitment officers -- tells Yancey he'll hate the job. At this time in his life, Yancey is full of self-loathing, so it's a perfect fit.
We meet a cast of Elmore Leonard-style characters powered on gossip and competition: overprotective managers, grizzled vets, total incompetents, ambitious newbies, ROs who confuse the IRS with the Huns and go to any length (legal or illegal) to get the money and close the file.
Along the way, we meet the ultimate RO trainer, who quickly tells his new charges what to expect: "I have been spat on, kicked, punched, pushed down, my hair yanked and had a gun pulled on me. I have been called Nazi, Gestapo, pig and other names that would make a Marine blush. I've had doors slammed in my face and once somebody tried to run me over with a car. I go home at night, and my wife tells me I drink too much." The trainer tells Yancey to lock his desk, because his co-workers will shred his case files.
Who wouldn't want to get a job with all that to offer? Almost everyone we meet in this pressure cooker is transferred or fired.
Every RO knows the Four Protocols ("The rules we may not say") of getting money from DBs ( deadbeats): Find where they are. Track what they do. Learn what they have. Execute what they fear.
The best parts of the book are scenes with the trainer and the thrill of the chase. It's a messy job collecting money from creeps who hide income or from those naifs who convince themselves there's some flaw in the Constitution and all tax law is bunk. (RO office poster: Only an accountant could nab Capone.)
But often the ROs are dealing with people who can't afford tax lawyers, people who are barely scraping by and just don't have the money, such as the case of a sweet woman running a day care center into the ground. Those are the hard ones, the ones you might pity. The legendary trainer advises: "A good revenue officer is as indifferent as God."
Little wonder that as Yancey's career rises, his personal life falls apart. His girlfriend, after all, was attracted to an unemployed English major.
The book builds to the hallelujah moment when Yancey, now at the top of his form, can use the rules to game the system and do good while following the letter of the law. After this epiphany, the book depowers into some romance and a strange bit with an injured dog.
In the epilogue, Yancey tells us that all these RO shenanigans could probably never happen again because of changes in the Revenue Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998.
After reading Confessions of a Tax Collector , here's some free advice: Go fill out your 1040, and make it snappy.
Taxes are dull, right? And what could be duller than a book about those drab souls that occupy that cathedral to taxation, the Internal Revenue Service?
But if you think that way, when you pick up "Confessions of a Tax Collector" you'll find yourself wrong on both counts. Author Richard Yancey, an IRS revenue officer for 12 years, proves that in the hands of a skilled writer there's no such state as dull.
Yancey's memoir about his years with the service is a rich mix of humor, horror, and angst that's better than most novels you'll find on the bestseller lists.
Although putatively a work of nonfiction, Yancey admits in an author's note that he's taken great liberties with just about all aspects of the book. All the people in the book have had their names changed and their appearances and histories altered. Extreme care, he writes, was taken to protect the identities of taxpayers (called "TPs" in IRS parlance), in some cases going so far as to change their gender. Moreover, he notes that he arranged incidents for the sake of clarity and to facilitate narrative flow.
These admissions tend to blunt the revelatory impact of the book. For example, was the group manager in the Lakeside, Fla., office -- that wise-cracking lady in black with the bulging eyes, a diamond-encrusted pin of an Egyptian scarab over her right breast and an Onyx spider ring on her hand -- real or was she invented to protect the bureaucrat's real-life counterpart? The book is a more enjoyable read if you suspend disbelief. Yancey's use of dialogue, fine rendering of characters, and acute attention to detail make the book read like a novel. When Yancey describes being interviewed for a position at the IRS, the hiring manager needles him about his inability to gain traction in a number of jobs including ranch hand, typesetter, convenience store clerk, cashier, adjunct professor of English, actor, director, playwright, theater reviewer, and journalist. "Anything you haven't done?" the hiring manager asked. "Singing telegrams," Yancey answered. "Anything you won't do?" "Singing telegrams."
Yancey began his career as a revenue officer at the IRS for very practical reasons. The starting salary was three times what he was then making. He ended it because he found love, and he ended it without regret. "The Service woke things inside of me that only being in the Service could redeem," he writes. "It brought me to the edge of the chasm so I could step over to the other side."
While much of Yancey's book tickles, there are also some frightening scenes of taxpayers being bullied into giving Uncle Sam his due -- or at least what he says is his due. For a large part, Yancey notes, much of that behavior subsided with the passage of the Revenue Restructuring Act of 1998, which included a tough code of conduct to protect taxpayers from harassment and intimidation by the IRS.
As a result of the 1998 act, Yancey writes, "today's new hires will not suffer as my class did in the early '90s. There won't be the unrelenting pressure to collect dollars, to conduct seizures, and to close cases. There won't be the 'cowboy' attitude of the old days, so seductive because it was so effortless."
While most people find little to laugh about when it comes to paying taxes, "Confessions of a Tax Collector" finds more than a few chuckles when it comes to collecting them.
John P. Mello Jr. is a freelance writer. He can be reached at jpmello@cox.net.
Charles O. Rossotti, Many Unhappy Returns: One Man's Quest To Turn Around The Most Unpopular Organization In America (Leadership for the Common Good), Harvard Business School Press, 2005, 352 pages, ISBN: 1591394414
Veteran of a taxing job: remaking the IRS
Around this time of year it's pretty easy to hate the Internal Revenue Service. But along comes a book that should force most citizens to reconsider their antipathy.
''Many Unhappy Returns," a first-person account by Charles Rossotti of his 1997-2002 reign as IRS commissioner, is a refreshing, if at times fastidious, account of one person's attempt at what might be the world's toughest turnaround.
Rossotti took office at the height of public rancor with the IRS: In 1997 politicians lined up anonymous victims of the agency to share horror stories of an organization beyond control, scoring easy points by demonizing the IRS.
A successful entrepreneur who had cofounded American Management Systems Inc., Rossotti was tapped on the basis of his business acumen and technological prowess, two key traits the organization desperately needed. And yet the overwhelming -- and fascinating -- message of this book is that business and technological skills are of little use in an organization where politics rule.
The challenges were severe. The IRS was, in his words, ''an impenetrable bureaucratic machine for writing rules with no practical input either from those affected by them or those implementing them." Moreover, Rossotti came on board at a time when the agency was severely handicapped by new federal regulations.
Any employee found guilty of infringing taxpayer rights by violating a new set of ''10 deadly sins" could be severely reprimanded. The computer systems were hopelessly antiquated, the bureaucracy mind-numbing. And on top of that, the agency was understaffed and underbudgeted.
Given these challenges, Rossotti did an admirable job effecting change. He enabled the electronic filing of taxes, improved morale, and boosted productivity. He made a serious effort to make the agency more ''customer-focused" by encouraging employees to be more helpful, less confrontational, and better able to help taxpayers. He fought hard with long-timers to persuade them this would boost collections by easing the process for most individuals, and reassured them this did not mean relaxing the collections process.
This involved a second daunting challenge: dealing with the IRS's culture of mistrust, one that permeated virtually every relationship, including those between employees, managers, and, of course, taxpayers (or as Rossotti called them, customers). His approach was straightforward: create a new mission statement for the agency, and communicate it relentlessly with employees.
Of course, he notes that he did so at a time when IRS funding was always under attack, and makes the inarguable point that no agency can be fully effective without the necessary resources. And in a time when politicians are eager to take the politically expedient role of bashing the IRS, it's hard to imagine that this agency will ever become truly world-class.
And so Rossotti cannot ultimately claim a dramatic turnaround. There are and may always be too many structural and political problems. Yet his honest reckoning of his time at the IRS, and his detailed storytelling, make for an excellent and fascinating read.
March 5, 2004, 11:08AM
By STEVE WEINBERG
CONFESSIONS OF A TAX COLLECTOR: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS.
By Richard Yancey.
HarperCollins, 384 pp. $24.95.
As the federal income tax filing deadline approaches, an insider's account of how the Internal Revenue Service deals with delinquent and dishonest wage earners might seem like a scary reading choice.
So who could have imagined a former IRS revenue officer would compose a memoir not only exposing the agency's inner workings but also offering humor, pathos and insights into the human condition on almost every page? Confessions of a Tax Collector is not just a superb memoir about working for 12 years inside IRS offices. It is a superb memoir, period.
Richard Yancey did not set out to become an IRS revenue officer. When he interviewed for the government job in 1990 at age 28, he felt desperate. Growing up near Tampa, Fla., Yancey came from an upper-middle-class family, graduated from college with an English degree, then tried a number of careers, including playwriting, acting, managing a convenience store and teaching school. Nothing panned out. He was living in the home of a widow six years his elder; they called themselves an engaged couple, but marriage never seemed realistic.
Yancey began thinking about finally establishing financial and emotional independence. The advertisement placed by the federal government for revenue officers listed a salary much higher than any amount Yancey had earned, so he applied.
The memoir opens with his job interview at the Tampa branch of the IRS' Jacksonville district. It is obvious from the first page that Yancey is an accomplished stylist. His eye for detail, his re-creation of dialogue, his ironic tone, his self-deprecation, all serve a memoirist well.
There are reasons for readers to feel nervous about the book, and not only because it demonstrates the power of the IRS. Yancey does not identify anybody by real name. He has altered personal histories and appearances of taxpayers, sometimes including gender. He has disguised his co-workers. He discloses that he has also altered chronology, "for clarity and to facilitate the narrative flow." He has relied on memory rather than contemporaneous notes.
Such practices can lead to exaggerations and downright inaccuracies. But there is something about Yancey's words that seem trustworthy. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, just as he sometimes gave delinquent taxpayers the benefit of the doubt -- especially a day-care operator whose case arises throughout the book.
Not so incidentally, Yancey's memoir morphs into a love story in its final section. Late in his career at the IRS he helps engineer the ouster of a supervisor. The new supervisor is Annie DeFlorio, smart, successful at work and physically beautiful. She is a private person, but eventually her subordinates learn she is going through an ugly divorce. Yancey becomes infatuated with her, despite his knowledge that romances within the IRS are taboo. He finally works up the courage to ask her on a date to the theater. What happens after that is worth knowing, but I have decided against spoiling the ending.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance journalist in Columbia, Mo.
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Chapter One: Challenger
For most of the past thirteen years, I have used a different name, chosen by me and approved by our government, to perform the task appointed to me by the people of the United States. This name, my professional name, I will not tell you.
I am a foot soldier in the most feared, hated, and maligned agency in the federal government.
I work for the Treasury. I execute Title 26 of the United States Code, for the Internal Revenue Service — or the Service, as we in the trenches call it.
I collect taxes, but don't call me a tax collector. Nobody wants to be a tax collector. Call me what the Service calls me. Call me a revenue officer.
And hear my confession.
November 1990
"Okay, Rick, let's start. Why do you want to be a revenue officer?"
I was sitting in a small conference room in Tampa, across the table from Jim Neyland, chief of the Tampa branch of the Jacksonville District of the Internal Revenue Service. It was after-hours. His tie was loose around his neck and his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. He was about fifty, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy black mustache. I had just turned twenty-eight, and was wearing a ten-year-old suit with a ten-day-old dark blue tie. The interview had been scheduled to begin an hour earlier, but I had waited in the reception area of the branch office, while his secretary fussed at her desk and his loud voice boomed throughout the office as he made dinner arrangements on the phone. There were no magazines to read, no television to stare blankly at while I waited. In one corner sat a dusty plastic palm tree. The carpeting was dark blue. The divider separating the secretary's workstation from the waiting area was white. The ceiling was white. On the white wall directly opposite me were two large framed photographs, one of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and another of the space shuttle Challenger. The bridge had collapsed into Tampa Bay in 1980, killing thirty-five people. Challenger had exploded in 1986, seconds after the photograph was taken.
Jim Neyland did not want Chinese. He wanted barbecue. He had been thinking about it all day, and his heart was set on barbecue. He hated Chinese; he was always hungry again thirty minutes later. He wanted some barbecue pork and some beans and corn on the cob and some coleslaw and he didn't give a good goddamn what everybody else wanted. No, not Italian, either. There would be no compromise where he was concerned. It was barbecue or nothing. The secretary flashed an apologetic smile in my direction and buzzed him again. "Mr. Yancey is here for his interview." He apparently didn't hear her. I examined my new tie for any picks, stains, or hitherto unnoticed blotches. I had to urinate, but knew the moment I bolted for the bathroom, Jim Neyland would turn the corner from the inner recesses of his office, looking for me. I stared at the picture of Challenger. Like most Americans, I could remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. How long ago that seemed — a lifetime or two. And now I was here, four months after answering an ad in the newspaper, more on a whim than design. My destination, my mission, was not as clearly defined as Challenger's, but in its own way was no less perilous.
"I need the job," I answered. I had decided not to repeat the preface I had used in my second interview, which had taken place two weeks prior to this one: Well, I never dreamed of being a tax collector when I grew up. This had not gone over well with one of my interrogators. "And it sounds like very interesting work."
"Well, you'll never be bored," Jim Neyland said. He picked up a folder and opened it. I could see my name printed on its face in large black letters: Yancey, John Richard. Inside were my application and notes from the first two interviews. I folded my hands in my lap, rubbing the tips of my thumbs against my slick palms. There was a motel-room quality print of a beach scene on the wall behind Jim Neyland, with a lone seagull perched on a picket fence, staring out over the dark ocean.
"So, you went to law school." His hair was thinning at the crown, a perfectly round bald spot about the size of a golf ball. Curly black hair carpeted his forearms.
"For a year."
"What happened?"
"I left."
"You dropped out?"
"I dropped out."
"Why did you drop out?"
"I decided it wasn't for me."
"It took you a year to figure that out?"
"I was kind of trying to live up to someone else's expectations." My father was a lawyer, as was my brother.
"Need a job to pay off the loans?" His tone was friendly; he seemed genuinely interested.
"Among other things."
He turned a page. "Boy, you've had quite a few jobs over the years."
"Well, the application said list everything for the past ten years." I stopped. I sounded defensive.
He ignored me. "Typesetter. Drama teacher. English professor...your degree is in English?"
"That's right."
"What the hell did you think you were going to do with that?" The question was rhetorical. He continued, "Dramaturge...what the hell is a dramaturge?"
"Someone who analyzes drama."
"They pay you to analyze that?"
"Not much."
"Playwright. Convenience store manager. Ranch hand. Ranch hand?"
"Sort of the family business."
"Get along lil' doggies!"
I managed to laugh.
"Anything you haven't done?"
"Singing telegrams."
"Anything you won't do?"
"Singing telegrams."
"What's your deal, Rick, besides comedy? I mean, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
He slapped the file closed and leaned back in his chair, cupping the back of his head with both hands, fingers laced ...
