Irs Finds Returns Taxing

When the Internal Revenue Service worker opened the tax return, powdery gray ashes spilled to the floor.

“You took everything else. Why don’t you take him, too!” wrote a widow who said she had enclosed her husband’s remains.

Americans are expected to mail about 120 million tax returns to the IRS this season, and some folks feel compelled to enclose a little something extra.

Audits be damned, these people want to sass the IRS.

One taxpayer burned holes in a return and enclosed a note saying “Burn Baby Burn,” said John DiBacco, executive vice president of the National Treasury Employees union’s chapter at the IRS service center in Philadelphia.

It’s the workers in the 10 IRS service centers, where returns are processed, who suffer Americans’ scorn for the tax collector.

“They act like it’s us doing this to them. We pay taxes, too,” DiBacco says. “Why don’t they talk to their congressman?”

The IRS says that, overall, only a small fraction of tax returns are adulterated. Such tax-time hi-jinks probably won’t increase the likelihood of audits. But depending on what taxpayers do, they could risk penalties or find their returns referred for possible criminal investigation, said IRS spokeswoman Jodi Patterson.

Some taxpayers, on the other hand, write thank-you notes to helpful employees. Cheery citizens also have been known to send in candy or an occasional cigar. But during tax season, more of the mail is mean, the workers at the service centers report.

Cranky taxpayers use Band-Aids, sewing needles, nails, even chewing gum to attach W-2 income statements to their tax forms, said Teresa Hill, who works at the IRS service center in Kansas City, Mo.

A nurse once hooked her forms together with a hypodermic needle - no one knew if it had been used or not. Neither could they tell if the ashes that the widow sent were really human remains, she said.

IRS workers laugh off obscene photos filed with tax returns. One person enclosed a photocopy of his rump, a prank that an employee at the service center in Fresno, Calif., dismissed as “not very original.”

Returns smeared with blood or excrement are treated less lightly.

The California worker, who asked not to be identified by name, recalls one taxpayer sending in a 1040 that had clearly been used as toilet tissue.

Unfazed, the IRS laminated the form and then went ahead and processed it.

Another taxpayer created a scare when he sent in a long-barreled gun.

Worried that the package was booby trapped, security officers had it X-rayed before it was opened and the gun was found to be unloaded.

An enclosed note said: “This is the only thing of value I have. Please sell it and apply the money to my tax balance.”

Tom Ochsenschlager, a spokesman for Grant Thornton Accountants and Management Consultants in New York, says his firm advises perturbed taxpayers to simply write their senators and representatives.

“I’ve heard stories of people who write profanity next to the amount that they owe,” he says. “Or, they write ‘I’m paying this tax under protest, but I don’t want this to go to the Defense Department.’ During the Vietnam War, there were a lot of these kind.”

Tax preparers with H&R Block Tax Services Inc. also discourage people from enclosing messages - it creates confusion and slows the processing of returns, said spokesman Todd Ransom.

Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union warned that sassy taxpayers invite the risk of a frivolous return penalty or even civil or criminal prosecution.

The tax law says a $500 frivolous return penalty can be assessed if a return does not include enough information to figure the correct tax, or contains substantially incorrect information.

It also says: “You will have to pay the penalty if you filed this kind of return because of a frivolous position on your part or a desire to delay or interfere with the administration of federal income tax laws.”

Most Americans resist the urge to mouth off to the IRS, Sepp said.

“Most are afraid of what the IRS would do to them.”