Bless the IRS !

Last week I sent an E-mail message to my friend Bill :" Tax

    form time ! "  He has always prepared my state and federal forms  in

    the past. But this year I  just wanted a quick estimate from him on the

    amount of refund I can expect. And I got it, about $ 900.00 .

           Instead of letting good old Bill do that tedious arithmetic ( he

    is a URI math teacher ) , I went right down to the Internal Revenue

    Office in downtown Providence. I had read about THEM now being more

    user friendly, willing to do  all that dreadful figuring themselves .

    And the information is stored immediately in their own computer

    system. This makes possible a quicker refund .

           To my complete surprise  I did not spend more than a half hour in

    IRS office with a courteous and humorous ( " You want to make a ' Monica '

    deduction for presidential campaigns ? " ) young man .

            I thought myself rather bold walking right into the lion's den.

    But I reasoned that I had nothing to hide from Uncle Sam . " They can

    probably sense when they 're dealing with thief ."



            A little later , at the State Division of Taxation where the

    young man had sent me, I pulled a yellow pen out of my coat pocket

    and looked at it with rush of PANIC : I had STOLEN the young man's

    pen !  I had a paranoid vision of him getting even with me big time .

        I recalled a similar scene from Arthur Miller's play " Death of a

    Salesman ".Biff had stolen a company executive's pen in the course of

    a job interview . Was that not a quick revelation of his untrustworthy

    character?

            Could I be ARRESTED for theft of government property and then

    found guilty of LYING UNDER OATH about it ? (  It was just absent

    mindedness, please believe me !  )

             I hurried back to the IRS office in a state of suspicious

    nervousness. I had to go through the line again as my reading glasses

    set off the metal detector .

             Inside the IRS office, I returned the " stolen " pen to the

    young man . " I'm VERY SORRY about this !  "  I said .

             I guess confession IS good for the soul .