Q. [Pause, interval of static.]
‘—of thing, which Triple-Six also found advantageous, argued that, under certain technical conditions, each dollar added to the Service’s annual budget could be made to yield over sixteen dollars in additional revenue to Treasury. A good deal of this argument’s body was devoted to considering the IRS’s peculiar status and function as a federal agency. A federal agency is, by definition, an institution. A bureaucracy. But the Service was also the only agency in the federal apparatus whose function was revenue. Income. Meaning whose mandate was to maximize the legal return on each dollar invested in its annual budget. Type of thing. More than any other, then, according to the resurrected Spackman, there was compelling reason to conceive, constitute, and operate the IRS as a business — a going, for-profit concern type of thing — rather than as an institutional bureaucracy. At root, the Spackman report was intensely anti-bureaucratic. Its model was more classically free-market. The attractiveness of this to the free-market conservatives of the current administration should be understandable. This, after all, is an era of business deregulation. How best, and how much, to in a sense deregulate the IRS — which, of course, as a federal agency, was set up and operates as a set of legal regulations and mechanisms for enforcement — this was a thorny and still-evolving type of question type of thing. Some saw Spackman as an ideologue. Not every proposal in the original paper was resurrected — not everything became part of the Initiative. But the time was right, politically speaking, type of thing, for at least the root essence of Spackman’s proposal. It would be difficult to overemphasize the consequences of this shift in philosophy and mandate for those of us on the ground of the effort. The Initiative. For example, an intensive new recruitment and hiring effort and an almost 20 percent increase in Service personnel, the first such increase since TRA ’78. I refer also to a massive and seemingly endless restructuring of the Service’s Compliance Branch, the most relevant [inaudible] of which to us here was the fact that the seven Regional Commissioners have assumed more autonomy and authority under the more de-decentralized operational philosophy of the Spackman Initiative.’
Q.
‘This is another complicated subject, one that involves an extensive knowledge of US tax law and the history of the Service as part of the executive branch and yet also overseen by Congress. A critical part of what’s now known as the Spackman Initiative involved finding an efficient middle way between two opposing tendencies that had hampered the Service’s operations for decades, one being the decentralization mandated by the 1952 King Commission in Congress, the other being the extreme bureaucratic and political centrism of the national administration at Triple-Six. One could say that the 1960s was an era, speaking within the institutional history of the Service, in which the District office predominated. The 1980s is shaping itself to be the era of the Region. Type of thing. As an organizational middle ground between the many Districts and unitary Triple-Six administration. Administrative, structural, logistical, and procedural decisions are now far more in the hands of the Regional Commissioner and his deputies, that, in turn, delegate responsibilities according to flexible but coherent operational guidelines, type of thing, which results in more root autonomy for the centers.’
Q.
‘Each Region including one Service Center and, with one current exception, one Examination Center. Shall I explain the exception?’
Q.
‘At root, under the Initiative, Regional Service and Examination Centers are allowed considerably more latitude in structure, personnel, systems, and operations protocols, resulting in increased authority and responsibility on the part of these facilities’ Directors. The guiding idea is to free these large central processing facilities from oppressive or hidebound regulations which impede effective action. Type of thing. At the same time, extreme pressure is applied with respect to one and only one primary, overarching goaclass="underline" results. Increased revenue. Reduced noncompliance. Reduction of the gap. Not quite quotas, of course — never that, of course, for reasons involving fairness and public perception — but close. We’ve all watched the news, you and I, and yes, more aggressive auditing is part of the picture. Type of thing. But the shifts and emphases in the Audits Divisions are largely changes of degree, a quantitative type of thing — including the advent of automated letter audits, which again is outside our area of working knowledge here. For us, however, in Examinations, there has been a dramatic, qualitative shift in operational philosophy and protocols. It can be felt by the lowliest GS-9 at her keypunch console. If Audits are the Initiative’s weapon, type of thing, we in Exams are the telemetrists, tasked with determining where best to point that weapon. As deregulated, there is now only one overriding operational question: Which returns are most profitable to audit, and how are those returns most efficiently to be found?’
947676541
‘I have an unusually high tolerance for pain.’
928514387
‘Well, my dad used to like to mow the lawn in little patches and strips. He’d do the east corner of the front yard, come in the house for a while, then do the southwest strip of the back lawn and a little square at the south fence, come back in, and like that. He had a lot of little rituals like that, it’s how he was. You know? It took a while to realize he did this with the lawn because he liked the feeling of being done. Of having a job and feeling like he did it and it was done. It’s a solid little feeling, it’s like you’re a machine that knows it’s running well and doing what it was made to do. You know? By dividing the lawn into like seventeen small little sections, which our mom thought was nuts as usual, he could feel the feeling of finishing a job seventeen times instead of just once. Like, “I’m done. I’m done again. Again, hey look, I’m done.”
‘Well, some of the same thing is at work here. In Rotes. I like it. An average 1040 takes around twenty-two minutes to go through and examine and fill out the memo on. Maybe a little longer depending on your criteria, some teams tweak the criteria. You know. But never more than half an hour. Each completed one gives you that solid little feeling.
‘The thing here is that the returns never stop. There’s always a next one to do. You never really finish. But on the other hand, it was the same with the lawn, you know? At least when it rained enough. By the time he got around to the last little section he’d marked off, the first patch would be ready to mow again. He liked a short, groomed-looking lawn. He spent a lot of time out there, come to think of it. A lot of his time.’
951876833
‘It was on either Twilight Zone or Outer Limits— one of those. A claustrophobic guy who gets worse and worse until he’s so claustrophobic that he starts screaming and carrying on, and they trundle him off to a mental asylum, and in the asylum they put him in isolation in a straitjacket in a tiny little room with a drain in the floor, a room the size of a closet, which you can see would be the worst thing possible for a claustrophobic, but they explain to him through a slit in the door that it’s the rules and procedures, that if somebody’s screaming they have to be put in isolation. Hence, the guy’s damned, he’s in there for life — because as long as he’s screaming and trying to beat himself unconscious against the wall of the room, they’re going to keep him in that little room, and as long as he’s in that little room, he’s going to be screaming, because the whole problem is that he’s a claustrophobic. He’s a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there’s going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone’s going to be in a living hell. The episode was even called “Rules and Procedures,” and none of us ever forgot it.’