Imagine if Brad Meltzer or John Grisham's first book had been a memoir about working for the Internal Revenue Service and you have an idea of just how thrilling Richard Yancey's Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS really is. Serving as a revenue agent--or, more informally, a tax collector--of the IRS for two years, Yancey went through strange transformations--from a tall, pencil-thin theater major, in an unforgiving relationship with no steady income, to a mean, muscle-wielding, unyielding revenue officer at the top of his game. What happens in between this tax collecting, money-hungry metamorphosis makes this memorable memoir the stuff of great fiction.

The Americans who shirk tax laws and responsibilities are inevitably tracked, coded, analyzed, pursued, and in general, marked for tax collection by a legion of government workers take center stage. "We have superior intelligence; we know more about our enemies' lives than they know about themselves. We know where they are. We know what they do. We know what they have. We will execute what they fear," Yancey writes. Just envision the line-up of misfits and average joes who populate the screen on Cops or America's Funniest Home Videos and you'll be close to imagining the range of people Yancey tangles with. Vengeful middle managers, hard-working small business owners, mean-spirited tax protestors, hardened tax evaders--the list of characters goes on and on. Every one of the people tracked within the walls of Yancey's local IRS office has the same, pitiful problem: the tax man cometh and the "beast needs to be fed." Equal parts love story, business tale, high-speed chase, and self-evolution, Yancey's Confessions of a Tax Collector packs plenty of human drama--all of it experienced and survived by one man. --E. Brooke Gilbert


From Publishers Weekly
After failing at a number of jobs, Yancey joined the IRS as a revenue officer in 1991 when he answered a want ad in the newspaper. As a revenue officer, Yancey was charged with collecting taxes from delinquent taxpayers. At the start of his career, Yancey was ambivalent about working for the IRS, but the longer he stayed with the organization the more seriously he took the job. A turning point came during a seizure (when the IRS seizes property from people who have been unable or unwilling to pay taxes), when Yancey stumbled across a band of tax protesters and took it as a personal challenge to root out as many protesters as possible-and in the course of doing so found himself living for his job. Yancey's account of his 12-year career starts out as a lighthearted look at his early days as an IRS trainee, but the tone is more somber and reflective as he becomes more enmeshed in his job, breaks up with his girlfriend, and finds himself isolated from nearly everyone outside of his workplace. There is a happy ending to the story, however, as Yancey marries his supervisor, quits the service and fulfills his dream of writing a book. His description of what life is like inside the IRS is generally engaging and shows the fallibility of a system that comprises, after all, men and women who have their own strengths and weaknesses. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* With a title like a TV movie and characters that would be at home in corporate-world fiction, this memoir of "one man's tour of duty inside the IRS" is downright absorbing. The author, who always wanted to be a writer, spent 12 years as a revenue officer for the IRS. He did all the things that make us despise the IRS: hunt people down, force them to pay their taxes, seize their property, destroy their lives. But, and this is just one of the surprising things about the book, he doesn't come across as a villain. He was just a regular guy doing a job he happened to be pretty good at. His colleagues, too, don't feel like villains--some were nice people, some go-getters, some corporate weasels, some benign bunglers, but, as the author presents them, they were nothing like the stereotypical, marginally satanic tax collectors you would expect to encounter inside the IRS. In fact, the book itself is unlike what many readers might expect. It's written as well as any novel set in the business world--crisp prose, nicely detailed and with a well-developed narrative--and at its center, there's a core of moral uncertainty. It's OK to hate what revenue officers do, the author seems to be saying, because a lot of it is hateful--but necessary. An excellent, eye-opening book. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
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.


About the Author
Richard Yancey worked for twelve years as a revenue officer for the Internal Revenue Service. He is a produced playwright, a former theater critic, and a published novelist.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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 federal government." 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

After failing at a number of jobs, Yancey joined the IRS as a revenue officer in 1991 when he answered a want ad in the newspaper. As a revenue officer, Yancey was charged with collecting taxes from delinquent taxpayers. At the start of his career, Yancey was ambivalent about working for the IRS, but the longer he stayed with the organization the more seriously he took the job. A turning point came during a seizure (when the IRS seizes property from people who have been unable or unwilling to pay taxes), when Yancey stumbled across a band of tax protesters and took it as a personal challenge to root out as many protesters as possible and in the course of doing so found himself living for his job. Yancey's account of his 12-year career starts out as a lighthearted look at his early days as an IRS trainee, but the tone is more somber and reflective as he becomes more enmeshed in his job, breaks up with his girlfriend, and finds himself isolated from nearly everyone outside of his workplace. There is a happy ending to the story, however, as Yancey marries his supervisor, quits the service and fulfills his dream of writing a book. His description of what life is like inside the IRS is generally engaging and shows the fallibility of a system that comprises, after all, men and women who have their own strengths and weaknesses. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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