Search - Confessions of a Tax Collector : One Man's Tour of Duty Inside 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.