The tax mess: who is to blame?

• Author: Schnepper, Jeff A.
• Position: U.S. Internal Revenue Service - Includes related article

TAXES are the price Americans pay for a civilized society. Audits are the proof that even the most advanced civilization has its terrors.

The Internal Revenue Service defines an audit as "an impartial review of the taxpayer's return to determine its completeness and accuracy." Sen. Edward V. Long (D.-Mo.) didn't agree. During the 1960s, he compared the IRS to a "Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens." His committee found the auditing and investigative techniques to include defying court orders, picking locks, stealing records, illegally tapping telephones, intercepting and reading personal mail, utilizing hidden microphones to eavesdrop on the private conversations of taxpayers with their attorneys, employing undercover agents with assumed identities, and using sexual entrapment.

In an April 26, 1982, hearing before the House Ways and Means Sub-committee on Oversight, Rep. George Hansen (R.-Idaho) alleged the existence of "IRS hit lists, snooping and spying operations, political retaliatory audits...and arbitrary assessments and seizures for punitive rather than tax collection purposes...." The case against the Internal Revenue Service, however, was presented more strikingly by the alleged victims of IRS brutality, who testified to individual confrontations with the service in great detail, including descriptions of forced detention, physical force, and the use of weapons for intimidation.

One taxpayer's wife, stricken with polio, needed an iron lung to keep her alive. An IRS agent threatened to seize it unless taxes claimed to be due were forthcoming immediately. The panicked taxpayer paid the alleged deficiency at once.

Internal Revenue Service terrorists show no fear. In Kansas City, Mo., police officer Paul Campbell stopped a speeder and started to write a ticket. The offending driver, after making the usual objections, identified himself as an agent for the IRS. When Campbell continued to write, the agent sneered, "We'll just have to check out your taxes." Soon after Campbell filed his next tax return, he was ordered to report to the Internal Revenue Service for an audit. It took four months of agency interrogations, repeated phone calls, and constant letter writing before the IRS finally admitted that Campbell owed it nothing.

In 1978's Richman case, the U.S. Tax Court was outraged at the lengths to which the IRS went to collect and keep some $5,000 to which, it turned out, the agency was not entitled. Its agents had padlocked the...