Most of us carry on what might be called an uneasy relationship with the Internal Revenue Service. We pay our taxes, but we're never sure when the auditor might come knocking at our door.
This time of year, especially, we curse and complain and wonder whether the guy next door - the one who goes to Barbados every winter - is cheating on his income tax return.Now comes a new and troubling account of how the IRS works, how it doesn't work and why it has been too willing to tolerate favoritism, politics and mismanagement.
The book, "A Law Unto Itself" (Random House, $22.50), was written by David Burnham, a former New York Times reporter whose previous work on New York City police scandals and nuclear safety lapses has been widely acclaimed.
Burnham is no crackpot harboring a grudge. His criticisms are well-documented; his aim is to make the IRS less punitive, less ingrown and more helpful. "The men and women who run the IRS are seriously isolated from the American people," he writes.
He contends that congressional committees tend to be cheerleaders for the IRS, partly because they want the revenue to keep rolling in and partly because it doesn't pay to irritate the tax collector.
Burnham cites numerous instances of how presidents - not just Richard Nixon, but fellows like Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan - have used the IRS to undermine critics and competitors and harass left-wing or right-wing organizations.
Nixon's aides were the worst - at one point leaking an IRS report on George Wallace to a newspaper columnist a few weeks before Wallace ran for governor in the 1970 Alabama primary.
Such incidents have diminished since the passage of a 1976 law making IRS records confidential. But hearings conducted last summer by a House subcommittee headed by Rep. Doug Barnard, D-Ga., pilloried the IRS for failing to punish corruption among its senior executives and for making life miserable for whistle-blowers.
Chastened, the IRS announced a month ago that future allegations of serious misconduct would be investigated by the inspector general at the Treasury Department, not by inspectors at the IRS.
"It's a good beginning," says Burnham. "I don't mean to say this is nothing." But he thinks the problem goes deeper than that.
The IRS, he says, is "obsessed" with punishing tax cheats and much less concerned about helping the ordinary taxpayer, often giving out erroneous or incomplete information at tax-filing time.
It's hard to quarrel with that. Internal surveys show that IRS tax advisers were wrong nearly 40 percent of the time last year, a figure neither Congress nor the IRS considers acceptable.
To be honest about it, my own prejudices toward the IRS are mostly positive. My guess is that 95 percent of the people who get in trouble with the IRS deserve to be in trouble with the IRS.