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DEATH AND TAXES
By Jim Doherty


It was 0930 when I reached Sac Prairie City, Wisconsin, after a four hour
drive from Chicago’s Loop. That made me thirty minutes late for
“Problem-Solving Day.”
“Problem-Solving Day” is a program the “kinder, gentler” IRS puts on to “help”
delinquent taxpayers pay off their debts to Uncle Sam. The idea’s that a local
IRS office will schedule a Problem-Solving Day, hopefully generating a lot of
publicity, so that taxpayers who are behind will be encouraged to come in and
meet with an IRS employee in a non-confrontational, low-stress kind of
environment, and work out reasonable payment schedules, settle disputed
claims, or do whatever else it takes to get the citizen out of debt.
Of course, this being the Government, nothing ever gets settled that day,
because any solution that might be proposed has to be approved through
channels, which means that the problems that brought those citizens into the
office aren’t really solved, which, potentially, makes for a lot of
frustration. Which is why I was there.
I’m a uniformed officer in the Federal Protective Service, one of the
Government’s more obscure cop shops. We’re the law enforcement arm of the US
General Services Administration, and since GSA is, among other things, Uncle
Sam’s real estate manager, our job is providing basic police service on
federal property and in federal buildings. The easiest way to think of it is
that, if you shoved all the roughly nine thousand Government buildings and
offices in the country together so that they formed one big city, we’re that
city’s police force. This is necessary, but not particularly prestigious work,
and it puts us considerably lower on the federal law enforcement food chain
than glamor agencies like the FBI, the Secret Service, or the DEA.
My role that day was just to stand around Sac Prairie’s local IRS office, and,
by my uniformed presence, discourage any frustrated taxpayers from acting out
their frustrations violently. Basically, it was, like a lot of FPS’s
activities, low-level security guard stuff rather than real police work, but
the IRS had requested actual cops, rather than contract guards, so here I was.
The local office turned out to be in a small, and rather charming enclosed
shopping mall just outside the city limits. Late as I was, it turned out I’d
still gotten there before any customers. Apparently they’d had a hard time
getting the word out. Of course it might have just been the weather. It was
mid-January, and, though the skies were clear and blue, it was bitterly cold.
Not the kind of climate you’d necessarily venture out in even to do something
you enjoyed, let alone voluntarily walk into an IRS office when you were in
arrears.
Quite a few IRS employees from the regional headquarters in Madison, some
forty miles to the east, were in Sac Prairie County to help out the locals.
Revenue agents, auditors, tax lawyers, at least one criminal investigator,
even the district director himself, Paul Coogan, were all there to lend a
hand. I introduced myself to Coogan, apologized for being a little late, and
explained that the second officer who’d been scheduled for this detail had
come down with the flu, delaying my departure, and reducing the number of
assigned coppers to one.