Adele Ferguson

SEN. BEN JOHNSON, R-Wis., said the other day he was not nearly as worried about the Big Brother collection of all our telephone numbers and Internet usage as he was the danger posed by the actions of the Internal Revenue Service.

More should be done on that score by the public, he said. It wasn’t right for IRS to demand all your financial information and you couldn’t refuse to give it.

Well, Senator. I certainly agree more should be done on that score, but it’s you guys in Washington who have to do it, not us. A lot of us have tried in vain.

Every once in awhile you read about some guy declaring he’s all through paying his income tax because he doesn’t trust anybody in government any more. You never read what becomes of them, but I’m sure they had the same result I did when I tried it.

IN THE LAST YEAR of World War II, I had a refund coming from IRS that never showed up. Inquiries got me nothing. So in the next year when I owed money, I filled out my return with a note. You still owe me more from last year, I said, than I owe you this year so subtract one from the other and send me the rest.

I got a prompt reply that said send your payment immediately or we will attach your bank account, put a lien on your car and furnishings and you may go to jail. I paid. After the war, newspapers all over the country ran the names of their local taxpayers who had not received refunds they were due and, sure enough, my name was in there. The IRS has to be the most arrogant agency in government.

A STATE SENATOR friend of mine told me about a mutual friend of ours who hadn’t paid income tax for years. Don’t ask me how he got away with it, but that was in pre-computer days. I told you when computers came along you could never count on anything going into it to remain a secret. Anyway, every once in awhile, every so many years, IRS baits the trap for reluctant taxpayers by announcing that anyone who hadn’t paid could now bring it all up to date by coming in, fessing up, and getting on board for the future.

The senator, a lawyer, talked our mutual friend into doing it, and they spent a lot of time retrieving and organizing the information desired by IRS for this to go through.

When the procedure was over and the friend had to pick up his information, what he had delivered neatly filed and organized had been dismantled and thrown all together into a big box like so much trash. That’s the kind of respect IRS had for taxpayers.

IT ALSO BOTHERS me how dumb these people seem to be and the fact they have no sense of what their job is all about. Who would be dumb enough to be in a picture line dancing or made up like Star Trek at a conference with expensive gifts and food you knew was not paid by you? It’s almost like a bank robber pausing in front of the cameras mounted in, the bank to be sure sure they got a good picture of him.

That former IRS commissioner who explained his 161 trips to the White House in two years by saying he took his kids to an egg roll should have been grabbed by the scruff of the neck by the sergeant at arms and dragged out of the hearing room. Jail to follow.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)