Why I Don't Hate the IRS -- and Neither Should You

If there is a more hated government agency than the IRS, I don't know what it is.

Last year, irate taxpayers threatened more than 1,000 IRS employees with violence, and sometimes they acted on those threats, as we saw last month, when Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his plane into a seven-story building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and a 68-year-old Internal Revenue Service employee, Vernon Hunter.

To many people who read about the tragedy, Hunter was just another government bureaucrat.

But there was much more to the man. Hunter was a Vietnam veteran, an usher at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, a father of six and, as IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said at Hunter's memorial service in Austin, a family man of "impeccable integrity." As the Austin American Statesman reported, Shulman called Hunter "a hero who loved his country, a man who defended his county and a patriot who served his country."

Those remarks form the context for what I'd like to talk about -- how taxpayer fears and anger toward the IRS are often misplaced and how the efforts of the IRS are vital to our country.

I speak as someone who has worked with IRS employees for years, both through my work at the Treasury Department and as a volunteer for the low-income tax community. Does this mean I think the IRS doesn't have flaws? No, of course not. But it does mean that I may have a perspective that might help shed light on why it is wrong to characterize the IRS and its employees as government tools or even traitors to our country.

First, let me acknowledge that there is something wrong with a system where taxpayers collectively spend 7.6 billion hours and more than $193 billion each year filling out their tax forms. The agency's internal watchdog regularly decries tax code complexity as one of the most pressing problems facing taxpayers. The tax code even trips up those who should know better, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner learned when his nomination was nearly derailed over his failure to pay the proper amount of taxes. We all would benefit from tax simplification, as the National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson wrote last year.

Unfortunately, the tax code just becomes more and more complicated -- it has changed on average once each day for the past decade and now contains more than 3.7 million words. But that is not the fault of the IRS. Rather, it is the fault of our elected officials who jam more and more special tax breaks -- from mortgage interest deductions to tax breaks for offshore oil exploration to prescription drug benefits and charitable contributions for disaster relief -- into the tax code. In other words, as much as we would like to simplify the tax code, when it comes time to give up a special tax break, taxpayers balk.

Second, even though very few taxpayers are ever audited, there is a widespread -- though largely unwarranted -- fear of the tax collector. Even our presidents have threatened to unleash IRS auditors onto taxpayers, as Richard M. Nixon did early in his presidency and as Barack Obama joked about doing last spring.

In reality, however, the agency does not tolerate this type of abuse. In July 2008, I spoke with Donald C. Alexander, whom Nixon had appointed to lead the IRS, about his now-legendary efforts to put an end to Nixon's attempts to use the IRS for political gain back in 1973. Thirty-five years later, Alexander, who died last year at the age of 87, was visibly shaking as he recounted how Nixon had threatened to have the IRS investigate his list of enemies and how Alexander refused to let those investigations take place. (In the end, Nixon learned that no person is above the law. In the midst of his Watergate battles, Nixon was also subject to an IRS audit of his tax returns and, when the IRS found that Nixon had taken an inappropriate deduction, he agreed in April 1974 to pay an amount that then equaled nearly half his net worth -- $430,000.)

More recently, Obama referred to the power of the IRS when he joked that Arizona State University officials would soon learn "all about being audited by the IRS" after failing to grant him an honorary degree prior to delivering the commencement address.

Since 1998, IRS employees can be fired if they threaten to audit someone to obtain personal gain.

Most important, in my work as a volunteer income tax preparer, I have seen the generosity of the volunteers who go out of their way to make sure their clients obtain all tax benefits to which they are entitled. I have seen the relief on clients' faces when volunteers explain the benefits of claiming the earned income tax credit, or when they learn they are entitled to a tax refund. As the midnight April 15 deadline approached, I also saw these workers staying late into the evening to help taxpayers meet the filing deadline.

With the recent economic downturn, the IRS is usually willing to work with financially struggling taxpayers to come up with a plan to solve their tax issues. As Shulman said, an agency that processes 140 million individual returns each year must look for ways to "walk in taxpayer shoes."

As April 15 approaches, we'll undoubtedly see tax protesters again call for dismantling the IRS, as if it eliminating the tax collector would eliminate the need to collect taxes. While it may be superficially gratifying, it is absurd to use the IRS as a whipping boy. Is there anyone who really believes that we could live in a world where citizens expect the government to provide benefits without raising the taxes needed to pay for them? While we don't all agree on which government programs are the most important, is it even worth spending time thinking that we could pick and choose to finance only the programs that personally benefit us?

When the government shut down over a budget dispute in 1996, many citizens for the first time realized how much they value things like national parks, public libraries and Social Security checks. Whether the tax collector is called the IRS or something else, the government needs revenue for our society to function.

The dedicated civil servants who perform that thankless but crucial task -- people like Vernon Hunter -- deserve the nation's gratitude, not its scorn.