Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS

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