‘If you think about it, you are not going to want to file a Memo 20 on a return just because, say, its Line 11 appears to understate alimony received by $200.’
‘Since the additional tax due on $200 of income is less than 5 percent of the additional cost of conducting an audit.’
‘You might, however, file a 20(a) and send the return to Automated Collections for a letter audit.’
‘That will depend on your group protocols as stated by your Group Manager and group protocols packet in group orientation.’
‘Which, in turn, will depend on your group assignment.’ Someone whose pile of luggage was in the seat next to Sylvanshine several rows up raised his hand to ask what a group was in terms of Rote Exams assignments. What was odd was that there were no data incursions for Sylvanshine on the mysterious child that Dr. Lehrl traveled with and kept near him at all times but never seemed to talk to. Sylvanshine knew that it was not Dr. Lehrl’s child, but that was only because Reynolds had told him so. It was as if the child were surrounded by a sort of impermeable factual membrane, or inhabited a fact vacuum. The big data Sylvanshine got for David Cusk, whose name he did not know, were the dimensions of his home’s bathroom’s medicine chest’s mirror and certain temperature readouts in twin columns with the left column’s numbers higher and illuminated in a kind of cheesy emergency red.
Page 24 had a diagram of the Compliance Branch’s Rote Exams’ Chalk—Team—Group—Pod organizational structure.
‘The standard triage works like this. The M1 printout from Martinsburg will already note and list certain incongruities, either in arithmetic or a cross-reference of, say, an ex-spouse’s return’s Line 29 with your return’s Line 11—’
‘That’s one reason the returns are forwarded to Exams—Martinsburg catches something.’
‘Others are forwarded because of criteria that may, as far as you’re concerned, appear almost random.’
‘Another advantage of the Master Files—now over 50 percent of the arithmetical and cross-file verification takes place automatically at Martinsburg, which vastly increases your efficiency and the number of returns this Post can process and reach audit determinations on.’
‘Though volume and throughput are no longer the criteria by which a Post’s performance is judged and evaluated.’
An involuntary grimace went over the Personnel aide’s face as he spoke. Sylvanshine knew this aide’s shoe size and total blood volume, but not his name.
‘The evaluative criteria now concern return on audit,’ the CTO said.
Without looking at it, the Personnel aide held aloft a Fornix twelve-column computer card and a sheet of printout.
The CTO said, ‘These represent Memo PP-47 plus a subsection for one’s Pod, Group, Team, Detail, and personnel margin.’
‘Margin refers to the ratio of additional tax assessed through audit to costs.’
‘—Including your own salary, benefits, housing allowance if any, etc.’
‘—It’s the new Bible,’ said the Personnel aide.
Sylvanshine, his eyes rolling up slightly white, received a whole slew of facts about the CTO that he did not wish to know, including the specs of her mitochondrial DNA and the fact that it was ever so slightly nonstandard due to her mother’s having taken thalidomide four days before it was abruptly yanked from the shelves. Training Officer Pam Jensen had a .22 revolver in her purse—she had promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation, which at current rates would be July 1986.
‘In the bad old days, it was throughput.’
‘The average rote examiner could clear between twenty-seven and thirty files per day.’
‘Now it could be four, five files a day—if your Audit-to-Cost ratios are good, you’re in line for an outstanding six-month performance review.’
‘Of course, the more files you throughput each day, the wider a field of possibilities for high-ratio files you’re going to have, and the better your chances of filing 20s that realize substantial gains.’
‘But you don’t want to concentrate so hard on getting through as many files as possible that you fail to identify especially profitable returns.’
‘We prefer not to use the term “profitable,”’ the CTO said. ‘We prefer the term “noncompliant.”’
‘But a flamboyantly noncompliant return could be operating off such a low Line 23 that it’s actually more efficient to forbear on it but to 20 the return right next to it, which, while containing few errors or incongruities, actually realizes a far higher audit assessment.’
‘These are matters best left to your group orientation.’
Now actual drops of sweat were falling off the ends of Cusk’s hair, as an inaudible scream resounded inside him.
‘Right,’ the CTO said. ‘Let’s have a break and get you freshened up, and we’ll proceed with general criteria for Audit / No Audit decisions.’
There was going to be a break. David Cusk had not allowed himself to consider this. The lights would come up. Everyone would get up and leave at the same time. If he stayed, the beautiful girl behind him would see his sopped collar and the V-shaped darkening of sweat on his blue dress shirt, which it had been cocky and idiotic of him to wear instead of the more prudent and undarkenable white. He would sit there hunched over, pretending to study the M1 printout schema in his orientation packet, his core temperature well into three digits, drops of visible perspiration falling from the ends of his hair on all four sides to dot the packet, the arms of his shirt, the sizzling side of his nozzle lamp—there would be no way people could miss it. If he got up, though, and joined the crowds moving up the ramped aisles to the two exit doors, there would be no way people could fail to see what was happening with him, including the beautiful haughty French or maybe even Italian woman behind him. It was the nightmare scenario. Thinking this way was all but guaranteed to cause an attack, which was the absolute last thing in the world David Cusk wanted. He willed himself to raise his head. The hot spotlight he felt on him did not exist. The woman behind him was a person, had her own troubles, and wasn’t paying close attention to him—that was an illusion. The only thing that mattered about his head was that it was in her way, that she had to cross her thighs tight and sit way over to the side to see the podium and screen, where a split-slide shot of two desks wavered while the CTO tried to focus the projector with a handheld appliance connected to the projector by a cord that had gotten tangled around one of her legs.
Sylvanshine, before the morning of travel, had forgotten to wash the shampoo from his hair. It was this that gave him the flame-shaped coiffure.
David Wallace, meanwhile, was not enjoying any general orientation with slick slide show. Instead, he had been conducted (by someone who was not Ms. Neti-Neti)—with no opportunity to eat anything—to the REC Annex and a small room in which he and four other men, all GS-13s, listened to a presentation of the Minimum Tax on Preferences, which evidently had its origin in the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. The room was small, stuffy, and had no whiteboard or A/V facilities. It did, though, smell strongly of Dry Erase Marker. All the other men in the room were conservatively dressed and hatted and very serious, with Treasury notebooks that came in zip-up leatherette folders with the IRS seal and motto embossed on the cover, which David Wallace had not received, and was taking notes in his private notebook folded over so that the IGA price tag in the upper-right corner was not visible.
The presentation was dust-dry and appeared to be very high-level and was made by someone dressed in a black suit and black vest over what appeared to be either a white turtleneck—which would have been bizarre in such hot weather—or one of those detachable Victorian starched collars that men used to put on and fastened with studs as the very final part of the Victorian dressing process. He was very clipped and impersonal and all-business. He seemed very severe and austere, with great black hollows in his cheeks and under his eyes. He looked a little like a popular representat
ion of death.
‘We will note, however, that RA ’78 revised the expansionist tendencies of the ’76 provisions by removing both long-term capital gains deduction and excess itemized deductions from the index of relevant preferences.’ The term preferences had been used several times already. It goes without saying that David Wallace didn’t know what the term preferences meant, or that they were Congress’s clever way of reducing a certain income group’s tax burden without lowering its tax rate—one simply allowed special deductions or provisions that exempted certain portions of income from the taxable base, provisions collectively known in the Service as preferences. Later, thanks mainly to Chris Acquistipace, David Wallace would figure out that the MPT/AMT Group was tasked to enforce certain special provisions that the ’76 and ’80 acts had put in place to keep extremely wealthy individuals and S corps from paying, through the use of what are called ‘tax shelters,’ in effect, no tax at all. The Immersive Group to which David Wallace was assigned was part of the Immersive AT/S Pod (for Alternative Tax/Shelters). It would be embarrassing to state outright how long it took David Wallace to figure this out, even after several days of ostensibly examining files.
‘We note, however, that the ’78 act also added to the list of eligible preferences the excess of Intangible Drilling Cost deductions over any and all reported income from oil and gas production, effectively attacking the energy-based shelters of the mid-seventies oil shock, as in §312(n) of the revised code.’ The way David Wallace was pretending to take notes was that he was simply copying down every last word or phrase the instructor uttered, much as he had for those college lecture classes in which he’d been hired to take notes for someone who was forced to miss class by a ski trip or extreme hangover. It was one reason why David Wallace’s left hand was way more muscled and substantial—especially the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, which bulged when the pencil was pressed to the paper—than his right. He could transcribe like the wind.
‘The provisions most relevant to your Memo 20 protocols are that ’78 increased the ATP tax rate to 15 percent and established the standard ATP exemption to the larger of (a) $30,000 or (b) 50 percent of the requisite tax due for the current year only, a provision which the Master Files render otiose but which the ’80 act’s provisions failed to address.’
One of the GS-13s raised his pen—not his hand, but just his pen with a small cool move of his wrist—and asked some kind of absurdly recondite question that David Wallace didn’t write down because he was flexing and unflexing his hand to ameliorate something that happened if he transcribed for more than a few minutes, which is that his left hand assumed a sort of automatic writerly claw shape and stayed that way after he finished transcribing, sometimes for more than an hour, forcing him to hide the hand in his pocket.
‘As of March of 1981, and subject to refinement in the case of fiduciaries and certain specialized industries such as if memory serves timber, sugar, and select legumes, the relevant provisions this group is required to examine for ATP computation are, excluding code sections except where immediately relevant, which sections you’ll find cross-indexed in your 1M specs 412, (1) Excess of accelerated depreciation on section 1250 property over straight-line depreciation. (2) Consequent to TRA ’69, excess of sixty-month amortization of certain items associated with pollution-control, child-care facilities, mining safety, and national historic sites over straight-line depreciation. (3) Excess of percentage depletion over a property’s adjusted basis at year’s end. (4) Bargain elements in qualified stock options—TRA ’76. (5) Excess IDC over fossil income as mentioned above.’ (David Wallace had no time to look above in his notes. He was trying to circle words and terms he didn’t know, figuring he could find a library. This list was not in his manual—they were given no manuals. It seemed expected that they’d already know this stuff. In order to deal with his feelings of confusion and fear, Wallace had opted to turn himself more or less into a transcription machine.) ‘(6) Being the excess of accelerated depreciation over straight-line depreciation on Section 1245 property leased to another.’
The man stood totally still as he spoke. David Wallace didn’t think he had ever before seen someone who didn’t fidget in at least a few idle, unconscious ways when he spoke in public. The bodily stillness would have been more thought-provoking if David Wallace had felt less panicked and overwhelmed, and besides automatizing himself by transcribing, David Wallace was doing the other main compensatory thing he did when he was in a room where everyone seemed to understand exactly what was being talked about but him—which had happened in certain social situations at Philo High, at which David Wallace had not been part of any one particular clique but had hung out on the fringes of several different groups, from second-tier athletes to student council and A/V wonks, and was often privy to gossip or references to group situations he had no direct knowledge of, but had to stand there grinning and nodding like he knew exactly what was being referred to. Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he’d accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential and Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic versions of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 to 10:30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement. Leaving the client—who was still enrolled—with his own very special sort of existential dilemma. The point is that this is what David Wallace did in these situations, which was to assume and hold by main force an enormous grin that he imagined communicated ease and confident familiarity with whatever was going on but in fact, unbeknownst to him, in its rigid distension and lack of eye-involvement, together with the skin situation, actually looked like the agonized rictus of someone having the skin of his face slowly torn off, which luckily for him all the room’s GS-13 Immersive Exam transfers and CTO shelter specialists were too serious and intent and engaged with the anti-shelter protocols—for that’s what the Team to which David Wallace was mis-ID’d and erroneously assigned through no fault of his own (though this orientation might have been the place to put up his hand) turned out to be, the examination and evaluation of individual and limited-partnership shelters in realty, agriculture, and leveraged leasing, which was a small but serious component of the Spackman Initiative—to notice in anything more than a peripherally uncomfortable way, as well as David Wallace’s youth, corduroy suit (which was the IRS equivalent of a Speedo and floppy clown shoes), and absence of hat.
A/NA, projected on its own b/w slide, was explained as the entire thrust and raison of Rote Exams.
‘Are you cops?’
The Personnel aide raised his hands and shook them and shouted out ‘Nooo.’ This was the same fake evangelist bit Sylvanshine had seen at the Philadelphia REC when he was twenty-two years old. The Personnel aide’s coin collection was kept in a portable safe in the rear of his mother or grandmother’s closet, judging by the styles of dresses and coats on the rack overhead.
‘Are you judges of civic virtue?’
‘Nooo.’
‘Are you sadistic bureaucrats arbitrarily deciding which TPs’ lives to make miserable by subjecting them to the anxiety and inconvenience of an audit, trying to squeeze every last drop of blood from the neck you’ve got your boot on?’
‘No.’
‘In essence, in today’s IRS, you’re businessmen.’
‘And businesswomen. Businesspersons. Or rather in the employ of what you’re urged to consider a business.’
‘Which returns will be profitable to audit?’
‘How do you determine this?’
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‘Different Exam groups do it different ways. Your group orientation will have the specifics.’
Aide: ‘Or your Team, since some Group Managers here have different Teams tasked to different criteria.’
‘You can almost think of them as filters—what gets through, what gets Memo 20’d and routed to District.’
‘Or signs, flags—at least that some return deserves an exhaustive exam.’
‘You won’t be going over every last return with a microscope.’
‘You want to work smart as well as fast.’
‘And fast means some you’ll know right away—this audit wouldn’t produce anything.’
‘That’s the criterion—will an audit produce a maximal increase when the cost of the audit is subtracted?’
‘So that’s one thing to discard—the idea that you’re guardians of civic virtue.’
‘There’s another common misapprehension to disregard. Does anyone have any idea what it is?’
David Cusk had a terrible, totally ghastly impulse to raise his hand. Part of his strategy for surviving the close-order mingling of the break until he could make it to a restroom had been to think hard about the final projected image on the slide projector’s screen, which the Training Officer never had gotten to quite resolve into focus but had been a split-screen view of two desks or tables, one strewn with papers and forms, plus a couple of items whose bright colors indicated they might have been food wrappers, the other clean and neat with items in piles and labeled baskets. Cusk was pretty sure the CTO wanted to stress order and organization and to banish the idea that a slovenly desk was the sign of a productive worker. Meanwhile, no one else had raised their hand. The idea came again of raising his hand and having the CTO point to him over all the turning heads, volunteering for the spotlight of all those people’s attention, including the exotic Belgian transfer or émigré, whom Cusk had managed to avoid during the break, from which he had returned early, and did not know that the woman’s glasses were so thick that if he’d ever seen her he’d have been able to tell that she was practically blind, at least in terms of objects more than three or four feet away, her eyes shriveled and oddly puckered in the irises, filled with cracks and fissures like a dry riverbed—she was about as exotic as a fire hydrant, and roughly the same shape—and he wouldn’t have been as worried about being seen by her as wet or sweating. In any event, he was correct, it emerged:
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel Page 35