Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey Read Free Book Online Page A

desks had been arranged in a large room at the rear of the building. There were two extra desks for our OJIs. We were not allowed to pick where we would sit. Rachel would be directly behind me, Allison to my right. Dee and Caroline would sit on the other side of the room. The desks were government-issued, at least twenty years old.
    “Where does everyone else sit?” Allison asked.
    “There’s a suite of offices beside this room,” Gina said.
    “Everyone else gets a private office?”
    “We’re not trainees,” Melissa snapped at her.
    “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Gina told Allison. “In the Stone Age, when I came on board, four ROs shared one church-social type folding table, with a single phone in the middle. We had to stare at each other all day and take turns with the phone. On the upside, it encouraged fieldwork.”
    “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