Confessions of a Tax Collector
One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS
By Richard Yancey (HarperCollins, 364 pp., $24.95)
The author reads at Davis-Kidd Booksellers 6 p.m. Mar. 8
Which publishing genius pitched the idea of promoting a memoir about tax collecting in the middle of tax season? For that matter, why would a publisher think a book about an IRS agent, the nation’s most hated professional, would sell at any time? Knoxville writer Richard Yancey confesses that, as IRS representatives, “We were below lawyers. We were below dentists. We were below proctologists.” Yancey certainly doesn’t expect this story to be optioned by Hollywood. As one IRS employee in the book puts it, “The reason there will never be a movie or TV show about revenue officers is, as a group, you will not find a homelier bunch of people working in a particular profession.”
The answer to the “What were they thinking?” question is simple: Confessions of a Tax Collector tells a good story—in fact, two good stories. Yancey’s account of his early years in the “Service,” as the insiders refer to it, is a look into a secret society, but it is also the tale of a young adult’s quest to find himself. After a misspent decade of transient jobs, stunted artistic endeavors and a stab at law school, Yancey responds to a job advertisement that offers a higher annual salary than he has earned in the previous three years combined. His live-in fiancé Pam, thinks he’s a “dummy” for wanting to work for the IRS, but he is determined to achieve something, anything, before his life descends into hopeless mediocrity. The book takes place in central Florida, a setting permeated by the stench of failure, and Yancey is desperate not to succumb.
The IRS branch Yancey has fallen into, collections, is the most feared of them all. Or it was: In an epilogue, he reports that after the 1998 Revenue Restructuring Act, which was intended partially to cut down on the “harassment and intimidation of taxpayers,” the Service discontinued many of the practices that Yancey describes here. So, in addition to the gripping personal story, Confessions of a Tax Collector is a historical record of the last decade in which IRS officers were bad-asses. They did not advise or consult. They did not hold your hand unless they were looting your bank accounts with the other. If you got a letter from Richard Yancey, Revenue Officer, you were in trouble. Better sell the Corvette and put the house in a cousin’s name, ’cause Rick is coming to take your stuff.
The first half of the book covers Yancey’s year of training, the period when the Service puts new hires through continual trials by fire. The emotional toll of seizing personal property and ruining the hopes of small businesses is profound, and the Service wants to know that its officers have the fortitude to follow ruthless procedure even when they know their actions will result in personal catastrophe for the taxpayer. In one of Yancey’s job interviews, a branch chief explains that he’s not looking for agents who can sleep at night after seizing property; he wants agents who can “seize houses even if it means that they can’t sleep at night.”
Yancey’s early days with the Service are painful. He suffers under the double pressure of confronting taxpayers while having his every move evaluated by his on-the-job instructor. At any point during his first year, Yancey could be fired with scant justification. He must learn the rules of engagement and at the same time negotiate the intricacies of the Service’s many-layered bureaucracy, so entwined with protocol and contentious personalities that Yancey dubs it “Byzantium.” The ubiquitous metaphor throughout is that of battle.
Readers will find little comfort in the knowledge that the IRS, at least in its 1990s incarnation, was filled with power freaks. The officer who is most honest about the salacious appeal of the Service’s power, William Culpepper, also becomes Yancey’s instructor, so the book offers heavy doses of his perverted philosophy. Early in Yancey’s training, Culpepper boils the job of a revenue officer down to its essence: “Power over...everyone. Think of your inventory as your kingdom and you are lord of the fucking manor. You are a prince. This job is about power and we, you and me, we are the princes of power.”
The second section of the book covers Yancey’s near-embrace of Culpepper’s philosophy and the potential loss of his own soul. Overcoming his initial reticence about exercising power, Yancey becomes one of his branch’s most relentless officers. He discovers that he’s good at collecting; the cowboy atmosphere suits him in a way that startles his sensitive side. In a passage reminiscent of Robert Duvall’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” speech in Apocalypse Now, Yancey rhapsodizes on the richness of a righteous seizure: “Dear God, I remember thinking, how beautiful the world is! My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, my eyes were watering behind my sunglasses, but I felt like Lazarus emerging from the tomb after three days of darkness.”
Despite such statements—as well as a foray into Yancey’s efforts to upgrade himself from a “skinny ectomorph” into a head-turning hunk—this revenue officer never becomes an egotistical bore. Subtle narrative twists, including a sweet and restrained romantic story, keep him from the edge of self-absorption and form the tale of his ultimate redemption. It makes for satisfying reading.
For all of this book’s delights, it feels at times as if Yancey is stacking the deck, and never more so than in describing his ex-fiancée. He portrays her as a selfish shrew who is openly hostile to his career choice and antagonizes him at every opportunity, even over the issue of her own growing obesity, which she all but blames on him. One senses that Yancey is not being entirely fair with this “Pam”—all of the characters’ names have been changed—but it is a measure of his success in making us sympathize with him that we cheer when they finally split. The same applies to the ending, clichés about the IRS be damned: We’ve come to like this revenue officer and savor seeing him ride off into the sunset. Perhaps Hollywood will come calling, after all.
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