Free Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey Page B

Rachel and Allison. Dee sat in the front of the room beside one of the new-hires from Tampa. The majority of the trainees in this room were fresh from college, making Rachel and me two of the oldest people in the room.
    “When you return to your PODs [4] in March, you will have forty cases sitting on your desk waiting for you. You’re gonna feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, and, some of you, very, very afraid. By this time next year, if you trust the statistics, half of you will no longer be employed by the Service. But I promise those of you who will be, as a former RO myself, if you stick with it, if you hang on through the training year, you’ll find this the most challenging and rewarding work you could ever hope to find. I guarantee that. The first few months are gonna be tough. We make them tough, because we want tough people in the job. We want bright, yes. We want ambitious, yes. But we also want tough. We want tough because without tough our entire government collapses.”
    Byron Samuels was about sixty, with a bone-white crew cut and thick horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and speaking barely above a whisper. He was a living legend within the Service. Brilliant, mercurial, eccentric, he once told his managers, “You gotta get out once in a while or you’ll go nuts. I’m never hanging a manager out to dry for jumping into the car every now and then and doing ninety on the highway.” A devout teetotaler, he cursed like a sailor in private meetings, we heard, often berating his underlings until they fled the room in tears.
    “Basic Training will teach you the fundamentals of the job,” he said. “The mechanics. That is, the ‘how,’ not the ‘why.’
Why
do we do things the way we do them? Because our tax system is based, in theory at least, on self-assessment and voluntary compliance. That’s the first two rails of our system: self-assessment and voluntary compliance. They are interrelated, in that you can’t have self-assessment without voluntary compliance and you can’t have voluntary compliance without self-assessment. I suppose, being 3.5s, you all can guess what the ‘third rail’ of our tax system is.” He flashed a smile. “Enforcement. You. Without you, our system collapses. Because no matter how fair the system is, no matter how much resources and energy we pour into education and taxpayer service, there has been and there always will be a portion of the population who will not pay.” He smiled again. This smile lasted at least fifteen seconds. “So. Make ‘em pay.”
    Sam Mason, our lead instructor, had been with the Service for fifteen years. His reputation was sterling as a technician and scandalous as a playboy. Even in the brisk Florida winters, he favored Hawaiian shirts that displayed his copious chest hair. He liked to brag that he never slept. In 1981, before the advent of airbags, he slammed his car into a light pole, suffering severe injuries to his head and neck. Those who knew him before the accident said the portion of his brain that governed personality had been permanently damaged. He spent his evenings, after the bars closed, at a twenty-four-hour restaurant, where he drank coffee until dawn and hit on the waitresses. Several clerks now with the Service owed their jobs to Sam Mason. He considered himself a creative person or, as he put it, a “right-brainer in a left-brained job.” He painted. He sculpted. He wrote poetry. During the second week of Phase One, he drew me aside and said, “I hear you’re a writer. I want to show you something.” He pulled a tiny square piece of paper and carefully unfolded it. “It’s better if you read it aloud,” he said. “But probably not a good idea in here.” It was an erotic poem to his latest conquest. The first lines ran: “As I lower my face / Between your widespread thighs.”
    “Well, what do you think?” he asked. He seemed eager to hear my opinion. “I really struggled with that second