Confessions of a Tax Collector (6 page)

“Speaking of the field,” Melissa said to Gina, “I’ve got those FTD Alerts.”

“On their first day?” Cindy asked.

Dee asked, “What’s a FTD Alert?”

“Why not?” Melissa turned to Cindy. “You know what Jim said.”

“What did Jim say?” Rachel asked.

Then Caroline, “Who’s Jim?”

“I didn’t go to the field until I got back from Phase One,” Cindy said.

“Jim Neyland,” Allison said. “The man who hired us.”

“That was
your
district,” Melissa was saying to Cindy. “This is the
Jacksonville
District.”

“They don’t have commissions,” Cindy said.

“What’s a commission?” Caroline asked.

“Why do they need commissions?” Melissa demanded. “They’ll be with me.”

“Well,” Cindy said. “Maybe if you want to take
your
trainees.”

“We should expose them as soon as possible.”

“Expose us to what?” Allison asked.

“DBs.”

“Melissa!” Gina said sharply.

“Okay,” Melissa said. “Tax… pay… ers.”

Caroline asked, “What’s a DB?”

“Never mind,” Gina said.

“Dumb bastards?” Rachel tried.

“Deadbeats,” Melissa said, with a defiant flip of her hair in Gina’s direction.

“We are not allowed to call them that,” Gina said. She was trying to be stern.

“I didn’t actually use the word,” Melissa said.

“It’s not politically correct,” Gina said.

“I don’t give a shit,” Melissa said. “If it were up to me, I’d line ‘em all up against a wall and shoot them.”

We trailed behind Gina into the secretary’s office, adjacent to our common room. Melissa and Cindy remained, to continue their argument. Gina introduced us to Bonny, the group’s clerk. Bonny was a pleasant woman with large, expressive eyes and a gentle voice.

“Welcome aboard,” she said.

“Behind every great revenue officer is a great group clerk,” Gina said. “Get to work, Bonny. Ha-ha! This way.”

She led us through a door into a huge room that ran the length of the building. We weaved between five-foot-tall dividers as heads popped up, like prairie dogs out of burrows, to ogle us.

“This is Examination,” Gina said. “You know, the geeks.” She introduced us to those present. I left that day without remembering a single name. Each welcomed us aboard and wished us luck. As a whole, Tax Examiners were a quiet, introspective lot, the true number crunchers of the IRS. Most revenue officers held diem in contempt and resented them for setting up assessments, sometimes in the millions of dollars, which we had no hope of collecting.

Next we toured Taxpayer Service, also called “Walk-In” by revenue officers, because taxpayers literally walked in, without an appointment, to obtain forms, ask tax questions, complain about a refund, or seek guidance with one of the mystifying letters issued by a computer in the Service Center. Today the room was nearly full. Gina explained that traffic began to pick up in mid-January and would continue to grow until it reached its peak in April.

“By April First this place will be standing room only,” she said. “By the fifteenth, they’ll be out the door, in the hall, and standing on the street.”

We returned to the conference room. Gina clapped her hands and said, “Okay, it’s eleven-thirty. Lunch!” She reminded us of the breaks allowed under the contract: thirty minutes for lunch, plus a fifteen-minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon. Dee asked if the two short breaks could be combined and taken with the lunch. Gina answered no, of course not. She left the room.

“I’m taking this up with Toby,” Rachel said.

“There’s no place to eat downtown,” Allison said. “Where are we supposed to go for lunch?”

“I brought my lunch,” Caroline said.

“I’m not hungry,” Dee said.

“Well, I could eat a horse,” Rachel said.

“I think we should all go to lunch together,” Allison announced. “We need to bond.” She clearly saw herself as the natural leader of our little group. She asked our opinion on the bonding issue. Caroline repeated that she had brought her lunch and intended to eat in the break room. Rachel suggested the restaurant located in the Burdines department store two blocks to the south. Dee said nothing. I had the impression she had a definite opinion about bonding but chose not to express it. I said I didn’t know anything about bonding, but I was hungry and now we had only twenty-five minutes. Rachel asked what would happen if we took more than thirty minutes—would they shoot us at the door? Caroline left. We were floundering already; after just three and a half hours of someone telling us what to do, we had lost the ability to make the simplest of decisions. I jammed my hands in my pockets, rocked back on my heels, and studied the ceiling tiles. Somewhere, perhaps, a squirrelly little man was wearing earphones in a windowless bunker, listening, the reel-to-reel humming at his elbow.

· · ·

We were gone forty minutes. The Burdines restaurant was not crowded at that hour, but our waitress did not share our sense of urgency. We would discover that few people outside the Service did: revenue officers are not known for their patience. At lunch we learned Rachel’s husband had once played drums for the band that would become AC/DC. Allison’s husband worked for the local grocery store chain. Dee was single, between boyfriends. I offered that I was single, too, but between the ring and the altar. Then I spilled mustard on my new tie.

We walked back to the office. “I’ll take up the rear,” Rachel said. “In case they do shoot us.” No one laughed.

Dee said, “Anyone ever have one of those anxiety dreams, where you go to school in your underwear?”

“Why would you go to school in your underwear?” Allison asked.

Melissa was waiting for us in the conference room. Caroline was with her. Allison’s attitude toward her turned icy—she had betrayed us, broken ranks on the very first day.

“We’re late,” Rachel announced. “We had an-eighty-year-old waitress who didn’t split the check right.”

Melissa ignored her. “Follow me,” she said. She was carrying a stack of blue file folders. We followed her into the common room, to a little nook behind my cubicle wall. Melissa slapped the file folders on a small table beside a computer terminal. Her thin fingers flew over the keys. Mustard-colored letters shimmered on the black screen, reminding me of the stain on my tie; I placed my hand awkwardly over the spot. Even while seated, Melissa seemed to be in motion, a dervish of nervous energy. She had that air of someone who is perpetually running behind with no time to finish everything on her plate. “Melissa even
sleeps
in a hurry,” Gina would later tell me.

“What are you doing?” Allison asked.

“Pulling these accounts,” Melissa said, jerking her head toward the folders by her right elbow. “This is IDRS, the Integrated Data Retrieval System. It’s linked to the mainframe in Martinsburg.”

She hit the ENTER key. A message appeared on the screen:

She referred to the first folder on the stack, then typed a string of numbers. “Here’s the sequence: command code, taxpayer ID number, entry code.”
Click-a, click-a, click-a.
She slapped the enter key again. Shimmering yellow numbers popped onto the black background. She tapped one of her long, tapered nails on the glass as she described what each set of numbers represented. “MFT, period, DLN, amount, lien indicator, freeze code.”

“I see,” Allison said, appearing absolutely fascinated. She had bulled her way to a position just behind Melissa’s right shoulder.

Rachel said, “I’m clear so far on everything except MFT, period, DLN, lien indicator, and freeze code.”

“Master File Transaction, tax period, Document Locator Number… you know what a tax lien is? If it says ‘lien’ in this field, that means we’ve filed a lien.”

“And if it’s blank, we haven’t?” Allison asked.

Melissa stared at her for a moment. “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “That’s right.”

“What’s a master file? That sounds ominous,” Dee said.

“Does everyone have a master file?” Caroline asked.

“Master File is our reference for kind of tax. For example, these two numbers represent Form 941, the employment tax return.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to use the form numbers?” Rachel asked. “Why use two numbers to represent three other numbers?”

“I never thought about it,” Melissa said. “It’s just the way it is.”

“Oh,” Rachel said.

“Probably has something to do with memory,” Dee said.

“It won’t help me remember,” Caroline said.

“Computer memory, Caroline,” Dee said. “Computer memory.”

Melissa shrugged. “The next set of numbers is the tax period. This, 8903, is code for March Thirty-first, 1989. So the MFT is Form 941, the tax period is the first quarter.”

“Cool,” Allison said.

“This long series of numbers is the Document Locator Number. Every form filed with the Service is assigned a Document Locator Number.”

“Why?” Caroline asked.

“So they can locate the document,” I said.

“We, Rick,” Rachel said. “We.”

“Right,” Melissa said, without a trace of irony. “So we can locate the document in our system. The next figure is the dollar amount.”

“Oh!” Caroline said. “I see the decimal now!”

“Good,” Melissa said. “There’s the lien indicator, and that last field is for a freeze code, if there happens to be one on the module. You’re going to cover all this in Phase One—I didn’t want to get bogged down. I want to get to the field on these Alerts.”

She pressed another button and the ancient printer beside the terminal began to jerk and whine. Melissa slapped it on the side with the flat of her hand. She raised her voice to be heard over the protests of the machine.

“All our shitty equipment is ten years obsolete.”

“So every return ever filed is in this—what did you call it?” Rachel asked.

“IDRS. And the answer is yes and no.”

“Pretty common answer around here,” Dee whispered to me.

Melissa continued, “The main thing to remember right now is IDRS is a revenue officer’s chief research tool. We capture every bit of information on a tax return, individual and business, as well as information sent to us by payers—you know, 1099 and W-2 information.”

“Wow,” Rachel said. “Hey, can you pull me up?”

“I could, if I wanted to get fired,” Melissa said. “And you can, if you want to. You are not allowed, ever, under any circumstances, to pull your account information, your relatives‘, your friends’, celebrities‘, spouse’s, ex-spouse’s, boyfriends’,
anyone
not assigned to you.”

Caroline had gone pale. “But what if it’s an accident?”

“Then you tell Inspection it’s an accident.”

“Inspection,” Rachel said. “I’ve heard that name before, but nobody’s explained what it is. What is Inspection?”

Melissa was scribbling something in the file folder.

“We don’t have time for that now, Rachel,” she said. “Anyway, I thought Toby would talk about that this morning.”

“He said we were being bugged,” Allison said.

“Well, then he did talk about Inspection.”

There are exceptions to every rule, and I would learn during my training year that there was an exception to the strict prohibition against “browsing” on IDRS. While it was true we could not access unassigned accounts, we were allowed to use IDRS to locate third-party information. For example, if an informant told us the taxpayer’s ex-girlfriend’s name, we could look her up on IDRS in order to ask her for information. This exception aside, the Service was serious about controlling access to IDRS, for obvious reasons. “Unauthorized access,” as it was called, was the leading cause for termination. For some, the temptation is simply too great. Why not look up how much Michael Jordan earned last year? Who’s it going to hurt? Or a friend asks you to see what her ex claimed as income on his tax return because she believes he’s lying to the judge. Or a buddy calls you asking about the status of his refund. With an IDRS password, you had access to information that
no one else
had access to, not the president of the United States, not the FBI, not the CIA. You were only a half-dozen keystrokes away from generating false refunds in the millions of dollars. You could find anyone, anywhere in the country, and sometimes anywhere in the world. The implications of access to IDRS are staggering. Give me your name and in thirty seconds I would have your Social Security number. Give me your Social Security number and in five minutes I would know how old you were, where you lived, what you did for a living, how many children you have, how many times you’ve been married, how much you make, what your investments are, if you are generous, sick, permanently disabled, or recently relocated; if you graduated from college, served in the military, pay alimony, live with your parents, had a recent sex-change operation. For most people, this means I would know more about them than they know themselves.

“Okay, since you wanted to know: FTD stands for Federal Tax Deposit. Alert means just what it says. Alert. So FTD Alert means Federal Tax Deposit Alert.”

“Oh,” Allison said. “Yes, I see now.”

“I still don’t get it—what
is
an FTD Alert?” Rachel asked.

“It’s an alert, Rachel, an
alert.
Means we got to get out there fast. They’re issued every quarter by the Service Center and we have fifteen days to make contact.”

We were racing down the interstate, packed shoulder to shoulder in Melissa’s 1987 Corolla. Allison was in the middle between Melissa and Rachel. I was on the right in the rear, with Dee’s hip pressing into mine. From my vantage point, I could see the speedometer. Eighty-six miles per hour.