Nowadays, the federal government is the closest thing many Americans have to a religion, with those employed by it regarding themselves as a priesthood.  Blind faith, if not dependency, tends to take over from observation.  But there are other likenesses: sanctimonious cardinals and government functionaries, grandiose department-cathedrals that suck up money from believer and infidel alike, and a series of truly shocking scandals of abuse.  Where our esteemed press is always eager to expose the least excess of the Church, however, many of these same guardians of the public welfare remain noticeably uncritical of a system of national and local bureaucracy run amok.  We are currently in the grip of several hysterias in this land of the free, but the greatest of these is surely the morbid attachment of many of our citizens to the dead hand of the state.

When you hear phrases such as U.S. government agency, let alone the potent words Internal Revenue Service, you perhaps think of an organization, offices, a reporting structure, and the like.  Those things no doubt all apply, particularly in a 154-year-old bureaucracy with some 85,000 salaried employees and an annual operating budget of $8.4 billion (more than the GNP of Rwanda), but in that world it’s easy to forget the most important element: people.  It isn’t an entity called “the IRS” with which I’ve found myself locked in a death struggle these past few years, and which displays, along with the self-restraining qualities of a Sherman tank, an illiteracy and incompetence it would have been hard to credit even a generation ago, when for the most part the IRS’s communications were necessarily boring but also accurately spelled and punctuated, and sometimes even elegant.  It’s human beings, all of whose salaries, benefits, and pensions, let us remember, we pay.  And it is these same men and women, with certain honorable exceptions, who time and again prove themselves so professionally and personally deficient, vacuous, arrogant, pompous, self-important on an almost imperial level, vain, shallow, deluded, intellectually and morally delinquent, and in general feeble that one might hesitate to entrust them with watering your plants for a weekend, let alone with the guardianship of our nation’s coffers.  Facing the wrath of such individuals is something akin to what I imagine it would feel like to be placed against a wall to face a firing squad composed of the Marx Brothers, armed with real bullets.

Readers may recall that I have previously addressed this striking combination of ineptitude and aggression on the part of our nation’s tax-collecting authority, most recently in “My IRS Hell” (Correspondence, April 2012).  Over the years I have been accused of many professional foibles, but never, I think, that of paying insufficient attention to the whims and caprices of the Internal Revenue Service.  That is not among my failings.  I hope those same readers will indulge me now if I return briefly to the varied and curious ways of an agency that is itself a triumph of bureaucratic pluralism.

I make my living (it’s a thin one) by the pen.  To do so, I’m obliged to trouble the editors of newspapers and magazines, many of them less elevated than the one you are now reading, located in a variety of foreign countries.  In order to avoid double taxation when doing business with, say, a British or a French or a German publication, one supplies them with a one-sentence letter from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, otherwise known as Form 6166, which states, “I certify that, to the best of our knowledge, the above-named taxpayer is a resident of the United States of America for purposes of US taxation.”  Even this rather tepidly worded official pronouncement, the theory goes, affords the bearer indemnity against the demands, no less rapacious than those of our own IRS, otherwise lodged by the exchequers of London, Paris, or Berlin.

And here the fun starts.  If, like me, your mission is to extract Form 6166 from the IRS, you should reconcile yourself to entering that strange world inhabited by our revenue-collecting agency, distinguished by pseudoconviviality and sustained inefficiency on their part, and by a rapidly accelerating loss of the will to live on yours.  You might think that this particular process would be a relatively brisk and purely technical matter: Someone at the IRS taps a few keys on his massively powerful computer, confirms that you have indeed previously supplied them your annual return and accompanying check, and voilà.  But in one of those demoralizing and expensive exercises of the absurd that constitute the basic fabric of today’s government-citizen relationship, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems.  Before obtaining your Form 6166, you must also complete your Form 8802, or Individual Application for United States Residency Certification, which comes with its own accompanying 12-page list of densely typed rules and instructions, along with the joyful news that the Treasury Department now charges “clients” a nonrefundable fee of $85 (up from $35 a year or two ago, before which it was free) in order to “facilitate” the process.  In other words, the IRS requires that you read a lengthy form before filling in a second form, before attaching to this a check that must be included but neither clipped nor stapled, before they, our public servants, may begin a leisurely consideration of whether or not to issue you a one-line statement confirming that you have paid your taxes.

Fortified by a stiff scotch, I did all this in May 2015, and in due course received a three-page form letter from the IRS office in Philadelphia.  “Dear Mr. Sanford [sic]” it began, before lapsing into that characteristic government prose evocative of a light fog moving over a hazy landscape.  Although the IRS told me that they had cashed my check for $85, it seemed that they would not immediately be able to issue the requested Form 6166, “as there is no recorded evidence of your having previously timely filed a 2014 Federal Income Tax Return as mandated by law.”  The anonymous letter-writer went on to note that I should now supply that return, “along with all accompanying lists, materials, and documents,” and do so within 30 days or else face the threat of “criminal penalties provided by law for failure to timely [sic] notify our Service of your 2014 earnings.”  This was curious, I reflected over another bracing mug of the J&B, because I had in fact supplied the missing document some six weeks earlier, in good time for the April 15 deadline to do so, and I knew this because the IRS had promptly cashed the check that accompanied it.

This may sound like no more than routine public-sector bungling, but what raises it to another level is again that successive mixture of simulated geniality, institutional incompetence, and psychotic aggression that many of us have come to know and expect when dealing with Uncle Sam.  The IRS, having lost my income-tax return but not its accompanying check, now required me to retrieve that document and its numerous attachments from their storage place, and forward them to the address shown in Philadelphia within a month, or else face the ire of that same agency and its small army of criminal investigators.  Since the IRS letter informing me of this somehow took 12 days to travel across country to my home in Seattle, I was left with slightly over two weeks in which to collect my previous year’s financial paperwork, copy and collate this in an orderly fashion, and supply it to the address shown in Philadelphia.  My original return had been properly sent, at their instruction, to the IRS office in San Francisco, but in this jungle of a governmental system, as incalculable as any oriental sultanate, the taxpayer is often required to act as a middleman between different outposts of the same publicly funded agency.

Following this initiative, the IRS did indeed provide the necessary note to confirm that I had paid my 2014 taxes.  It arrived at the end of August, four months after I had requested it, and 15 weeks after the IRS had banked the check that accompanied my application.  It had been necessary to freeze my overseas income, such as it is, in the meantime, and I had taken out a bank loan to cover the shortfall.  Under the circumstances, I felt moved to write to the IRS office in Philadelphia to point out the direct, out-of-pocket cost of their administrative error.  Their eventual form letter to me did not include the word sorry, but did contain the words We will reply and Within sixty days.  As I write this, that was just over 16 months ago, and it remains the last I have heard from them in the matter.  I again wrote to the IRS Philadelphia office in December 2015 just to jog their memory, but perhaps my letter was overlooked in the course of their prolonged Christmas—sorry, holiday—shutdown.  In January 2016 I wrote directly to the IRS ombudsman in Washington D.C., who at length replied with the distressing news that the agency was currently facing “extreme challenges in meeting current workload commitments in a timely fashion,” but that, notwithstanding such intolerable pressure, they would “reply to taxpayer C. Sanford [sic]” in due course, and as that was only 11 months ago I suppose they still might.

The reader may feel that all this was just one of those things that happen from time to time when dealing with a sclerotic government bureaucracy like the IRS, and I might through gritted teeth be tempted to agree, had the entire fiasco not recurred the following year.  Once again I duly provided the IRS (San Francisco) with my completed federal tax return, once again I waited several weeks and then sent off my paid application for Form 6166 certification, and once again the IRS (Philadelphia) told me that this privilege had been denied me (although I noticed they had no reservations about cashing my check for $85) because “Our records not indicating you sent us an income tax return as required.”  Once again, I was obliged to retrieve my already filed return, and its accompanying documents, and to courier this material at my expense back to the IRS office that had lost it in the first place.  Once again I took out a bridging loan to cover the shortfall in income caused by the IRS’s faulty record-keeping, and once again I wrote to my friends in Philadelphia to point out their error.  This time, no reply was forthcoming.

At that stage I did what any public-minded citizen would do and wrote to the commissioner of the IRS, John Koskinen.  Koskinen, who was previously the CEO of Freddie Mac, and before that chair of President Clinton’s Council on the Year 2000 “Problem” (we all make mistakes), happens, like me, to have been at Cambridge University, although I didn’t presume on that connection in my letter.  “Dear Mr. Commissioner,” I wrote, before politely drawing to his attention the systematic failure of the IRS system to exchange information in a “timely” manner between one regional outpost and another, to the direct cost and inconvenience of, presumably, many thousands of compliant taxpayers.  It wasn’t that I was expecting a friendly word of thanks from Mr. Koskinen, whom we pay a base salary of $167,000, but perhaps one of those “Mr. Sanford” form responses I’ve come to know if not to love over the years might have been in order.  But once again, nada.  You could always take it up a notch, I suppose, but my (painful) experience is that if you have your neighborhood attorney write to the IRS, the agency in turn makes use of one of its 2,700 “special agents” or, if you persist, one of the tens of thousands of outside lawyers whom they pay in excess of $1,000 an hour to intimidate you by reminding you of the IRS’s widespread powers to enforce liens and seize assets without first obtaining a judgment in court.

I appreciate the role of the IRS in the proper stewardship of the nation’s domestic revenue.  I have been to Washington D.C., and gazed there upon the majesty of the agency’s headquarters building, with its engraved inscription attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr: “Taxes Are What We Pay for a Civilized Society.”  I acknowledge that my losing a few thousand dollars because of the IRS’s institutional incompetence and systematic refusal to so much as answer my polite letters on the subject is pretty small change compared with the horror stories of seized homes and ruined lives you can read about at your leisure on the internet.  Nonetheless, I admit it all got me thinking about matters such as the citizen’s proper relationship to the state, the power we seem to have ceded to the government, and the often feckless and sometimes criminally negligent way in which the government uses it.  One of the more bizarre mysteries of contemporary American politics is the irresistible, bipartisan growth of the federal workforce, which currently contains some 2.7 million salaried individuals in civilian agencies, or 22 million if you include all federal, state, and local government—a ten-percent jump since Barack Obama came upon us in January 2009, but less than the 17-percent hike achieved under his predecessor, George W. Bush.  It is bizarre because it seems each president who takes office faithfully promises us that he will make it his mission to eliminate government waste and inefficiency, and to control public spending.  But most presidents and their advisors are intelligent, practical people, and they know that the real world of Washington bureaucracy rarely resembles the simplistic model portrayed on the campaign trail, where “You’re fired” translates as easily as it does in the civilian workplace.  They know that the proliferation over the past 25 years or so of public-employee unions and tenured civil servants at all levels of the federal, state, and local governments effectively makes it impossible to sack even the most dishonest, corrupt, or incompetent time-servers whose salaries and benefits we so generously subsidize.

Hurricane Trump has hit the marbled halls of Washington, and without actively holding my breath I await developments.  In the meantime, this is how we now live.