Saturday night, I got a phone call. It was a recorded message telling me that the IRS was filing a lawsuit against me. I was instructed to call a phone number provided by the recording and that an IRS agent would answer.
When I called, someone answered. I was asked for my name and address. Then I was placed on hold for a few minutes.
When the person who had answered the phone started talking again, he told me that the conversation was being listened to by "a jury member" and also someone else; I think he said it was someone from the Attorney General's office. The IRS employee told me "to listen carefully and not interrupt" him while he was talking. He then began to speak loudly, telling me that I'd been "randomly selected for an audit by the IRS," and that the IRS had found that I had "made a mistake" between 2011 and 2016 and that I owed the IRS "$3989." I wrote about the phone call as soon as it happened.
I don't know how the phone call would have ended if I hadn't hung up while the IRS employee was shouting at me that I owed the IRS thousands of dollars; it seemed as if that were my only alternative to "interrupting" him to ask what he was talking about.
My question is whether this is how the IRS has always conducted lawsuits against Americans. What was happening on the phone? Was that all the due process that I'm given for the federal government's lawsuit against me? Is that how they adjudicate these cases? They call an unsuspecting person at home at night, tell the person to call a number, get an attorney for the government and a jury member selected by the government to listen to the conversation, tell the defendant "don't interrupt," accuse the defendant of a financial impropriety, issue a verdict, and then inform the silenced, convicted defendant of the consequences of not complying with the verdict?
After I hung up, I thought that perhaps hanging up while the federal government was accusing me of a crime was an ill-considered response, so I called back. Nobody answered; I left a message.
Copyright L. Kochman, February 20, 2017 @ 12:35 a.m./No code, all policies operative, all the time. I will publish all of my code policies again, when I have stopped simultaneously laughing and shivering about my conversation with the IRS.
