They know where you live, where you work, how much money you make … and that's just the beginning. Welcome to the IRS. Amid cover-ups, illicit affairs, and scheming corporate climbers, IRS revenue officer Richard Yancey pulled himself from the brink of moral, ethical and spiritual bankruptcy, and lived to tell the tale. Download now and discover the internal world of the IRS from an insider.

Intrigues. Illicit affairs.
Scheming corporate climbers.
Welcome to the IRS.

Plug anyone's name -- yes, yours -- into the computer at the Internal Revenue Service, add a Social Security number, and within three minutes, they know this about you: every place you've ever worked, how much money you make, who your spouse is, and where your investments are. And that's just the beginning.

Confessions of a Tax Collector is the story of how being granted virtually unlimited power over other people's lives can radically alter one's own. Twelve years ago, Richard Yancey needed a job. He answered a blind ad in the newspaper offering a starting salary higher than what he'd made over the three previous years combined. It turned out that the job was as a field officer with the Internal Revenue Service, the most hated and feared organization in the federal government. It also turned out that Yancey was brilliant at it.

In this secretive, paranoid culture, built around the premise of war, Yancey became a revenue officer, the man who gets in his car, drives to your house, knocks on the door, and makes you pay. Never mind that his car is littered with candy wrappers, his palms are sweaty, and he can't remember where he stashed his own tax records. He's there on the authority of the United States government.

Yancey's keen eye and sardonic wit capture all the intrigue, fury, and ridiculous vanity beneath the dark suits and mirrored sunglasses. While sketching an astonishing cast of too-strange-for-fiction characters, Yancey details how the job changed him, and how he managed to pull himself back from the brink of moral, ethical, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Confessions of a Tax Collector is a memoir that reads like fiction. If only that were true. You may never lie to your accountant again . . . because it's the Internal Revenue Service's world -- and we just pay taxes in it.

For most of the past thirteen years, I have used a different name, chosen by me and approved by our government, to perform the task appointed to me by the people of the United States. This name, my professional name, I will not tell you.

I am a foot soldier in the most feared, hated, and maligned agency in the federal government.

I work for the Treasury. I execute Title 26 of the United States Code, for the Internal Revenue Service -- or the Service, as we in the trenches call it.

I collect taxes, but don't call me a tax collector. Nobody wants to be a tax collector. Call me what the Service calls me. Call me a revenue officer.

And hear my confession.

November 1990

"Okay, Rick, let's start. Why do you want to be a revenue officer?"

I was sitting in a small conference room in Tampa, across the table from Jim Neyland, chief of the Tampa branch of the Jacksonville District of the Internal Revenue Service. It was after-hours. His tie was loose around his neck and his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. He was about fifty, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy black mustache. I had just turned twenty-eight, and was wearing a ten-year-old suit with a ten-day-old dark blue tie. The interview had been scheduled to begin an hour earlier, but I had waited in the reception area of the branch office, while his secretary fussed at her desk and his loud voice boomed throughout the office as he made dinner arrangements on the phone. There were no magazines to read, no television to stare blankly at while I waited. In one corner sat a dusty plastic palm tree. The carpeting was dark blue. The divider separating the secretary's workstation from the waiting area was white. The ceiling was white. On the white wall directly opposite me were two large framed photographs, one of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and another of the space shuttle Challenger. The bridge had collapsed into Tampa Bay in 1980, killing thirty-five people. Challenger had exploded in 1986, seconds after the photograph was taken.

Jim Neyland did not want Chinese. He wanted barbecue. He had been thinking about it all day, and his heart was set on barbecue. He hated Chinese; he was always hungry again thirty minutes later. He wanted some barbecue pork and some beans and corn on the cob and some coleslaw and he didn't give a good goddamn what everybody else wanted. No, not Italian, either. There would be no compromise where he was concerned. It was barbecue or nothing. The secretary flashed an apologetic smile in my direction and buzzed him again. "Mr. Yancey is here for his interview." He apparently didn't hear her. I examined my new tie for any picks, stains, or hitherto unnoticed blotches. I had to urinate, but knew the moment I bolted for the bathroom, Jim Neyland would turn the corner from the inner recesses of his office, looking for me. I stared at the picture of Challenger. Like most Americans, I could remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. How long ago that seemed -- a lifetime or two. And now I was here, four months after answering an ad in the newspaper, more on a whim than design. My destination, my mission, was not as clearly defined as Challenger's, but in its own way was no less perilous.