Frugal Irs Worker Bequeaths $22 Million

So you think auditors for the Internal Revenue Service don’t have a heart? Anne Scheiber did, and gave $22 million to a university that never heard of her.

Scheiber retired in 1944 after a 23-year career at the tax agency, and invested her $5,000 savings in the stock market. When she died in January at age 101, her holdings stood at $22 million in a portfolio that included Coca-Cola, Paramount and Schering-Plough.

Scheiber, who lived alone, decided to bequeath virtually all of her fortune to Yeshiva University to support scholarships for Jewish female students.

“Elation would be an understatement,” Yeshiva’s president, Norman Lamm, said Sunday in describing his reaction to learning of the windfall gift. “At first I didn’t believe it - there was a certain disbelief.”

Lamm said the bequest would go solely to aid needy students at Stern College, Yeshiva’s women’s college, or female students at the university’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Stern has about 900 of the university’s 6,000 students.

Yeshiva, located in Manhattan, has had at least one larger gift - a $40 million bequest about two years ago.

Scheiber wanted the money used to help other women overcome job discrimination, which she endured at the IRS, said her attorney, Benjamin Clark. While working at the tax agency, she never earned more than $4,000 a year and never received a promotion, despite having a law degree, he said.

“She felt she was discriminated against because she was a female. This grew on her year after year,” Clark said. “She was very much embittered while employed at the IRS.”

Clark, who had known Scheiber since the mid-1950s, said she led a solitary, closeted life, devoting virtually all her time to following the stock market.

She lived frugally in the same studio apartment on Manhattan’s West Side for decades, never even changing the furniture, he said.

“She was the loneliest person. I never saw her smile,” Clark said. Her will included two other bequests: $50,000 to a niece and $100,000 to the American Society for Technion-Israel Institute for Technology, a fund-raising arm of the Israeli school.