“The Infernal Revenue Service”

It’s Tax Day!

Many years ago the IRS audited Alice and myself, which we learned when IRS Bureaucratic Bunker 138 stroke 6 sent us a demand for $3,000 or so.

Soon thereafter we also heard from IRS Bureaucratic Bunker 77 stroke 0, demanding a payment of around $4,000.

Well, which was it? $3,000 or $4,000? After some time on the phone we were offered a compromise: okay, send us $7,000 and we’ll call it even.

This was a new meaning to the word “compromise” I had heretofore been unaware of.

We paid $3,000 while we hashed it out, and eventually the IRS decided that would be enough. Wasn’t that nice of them?

My first exposure to the IRS came due to my work as a newspaper reporter as I was working my way through college.

Our office manager was having trouble scraping together the funds to pay us one month, and hit upon the simple strategy of just not paying the IRS their cut.

Yeah, that didn’t work out too well.

He got a visit. A repayment schedule was arranged.

The following month the IRS—ignoring the payment schedule—took everything at once and all our paychecks bounced.

When our office manager asked what the hey was up with that, they simply replied:

“We changed our minds.”

When I sold my first video game to Radio Shack, they sent me my first royalty check for quite a princely sum, which caused Alice eyes to pop out of her head.

Whereas her frequent complaint until that point had been, “You spend too much time on that damned computer,” this caused her to amend that to, “Why don’t you go spend some more time on that damned computer?”

But unfortunately the paperwork that told the IRS the check was on its way travelled through the post far quicker than the check itself, and by the time I had it in my hands we’d already gotten a notice from the IRS that we owed not only the taxes on it, but late penalties as well.

Lovely, simply lovely. If we’d had a proper tax guy at that point we probably could have beaten it, but that came later.

A close family friend was in the habit of sending his taxes with the check made out to “The Infernal Revenue Service”—an amusing protest, to be sure, but quite ineffectual, as the check always cleared nonetheless.

I suppose it’s a DBA.

When I was a DJ for radio station K-LOVE in Santa Rosa, CA, I’d often read the PSAs to myself aloud beforehand, just to familiarize myself with them before going live on the air.

That worked in my favor the day I read one that began, “The IRS would like to remind its customers…”

I burst into laughter, then began shouting to the empty studio, “Its customers… customers? Is there anywhere else us customers can take our business?”

When it came time to read the PSA on the air, I did a creditable job, although I did have some difficulty keeping a straight face.