... but the IRS deliberately cultivates that reputation. They WANT to be known as baby-eating killers,...

Yep, some employees get off on that crap. We hate those guys. They make the papers in unflattering ways that reflect on all of us.

By shortly after the beginning of this century, most of them had retired or been put on a short leash. Things are changing now...and not for the better, I'm afraid.

...the IRS has to pull something like holding day care students hostage until the parents pay the school's taxes.

Technically, that's not what happened. However, that's how it was perceived.

(What actually happened was that when parents came in to pick up their kids and drop off their payments to the school, the IRS Revenue Officer present asked them to wait while he prepared a form for each of them seizing the checks. There was a delay for anyone who cooperated which meant they were delayed in being reunited with their kids. There was nothing to stop any of them from simply saying "Get stuffed. Mail it to me. I'm taking my kid and leaving." other than their fear of authority.)

In the aftermath of that incident, every single Revenue Officer at the IRS got a special training session on "This is how you screw up public relations. Don't do anything this stupid!" That case study is actually a part of the formal training for new Officers now, along with a strong admonition that any Officer who makes the Bureau look that bad in public again is committing career suicide.

But, yeah, a lead Revenue Officer on a seizure really screwed up one time. I don't think that justifies condemning the whole agency.

One of her favorite stories was when she learned that the majority of the time, an audit occurred because the IRS's records on you didn't match, and rather than figure it out they audit you to make you figure it out.

That's a valid way of characterizing an audit. I see nothing wrong with that. If the records are screwed up, the IRS is going to have to ask you for help figuring out why the records don't seem to be in order. That's an audit.

I don't see why anybody would consider that a problem. How else would the problem get fixed? Would you prefer the IRS just guess why the records don't match up?

One of them had several (3 or 4) years in a row where his tax refund would have been miniscule, something like $10 or $20 in the black, so he didn't even bother sending in the forms. He figured he'd just let the government keep the money. The IRS responded by sending him a bill for roughly $10,000 owed, because they figured that was a nice round number to make up.

That person was an idiot. If they don't claim their deductions, they don't get them. How would the IRS know they deserved those deductions? Would you like the IRS to just guess?

Hmmmm...considering the top quote in my reply, maybe that is what you had in mind. If so, it doesn't work very well, as your anecdote makes clear.

By statutory requirement, all such letters contain an explanation. The explanation is frequently a reference to a code section and, admittedly, to most people that may make no sense. However, the explanation is always present.

Call up and ask for an explanation. Most of the people who work the phones are pretty good at turning a letter full of legal jargon into plain English. They do it all day long.

Pro-tip: Tell the person who answers the phone the form number on the bottom of the letter. There are limited number of boilerplate paragraphs that go into each numbered letter and if they know the form number, they can help you zero in on your problem double-quick.

The story of your friend needs some more details.

If a final report from a Tax Compliance Officer (the people who audit you in the office) is for a net tax increase and the taxpayer doesn't wait around, it will be mailed out for a signature. Thus, I doubt your friend; his story is very low-percentage.

Of course, there is that low percentage. If the amount is low enough, the TCO and their manager may decide to close the case with no further work (called a "Survey"; there are several sub-types) which means that they just dump it back into the central files because the cost of processing the new assessment is more than the IRS could collect.

That power-tripping you referred to? People who screw up on their taxes and get a lecture along the lines of "You did this wrong. Please don't do it again." will frequently perceive that as a power trip. The IRS looks at it as an educational opportunity.

I suspect the real truth of this story is somewhere in between.

It's part of the price you pay for a sweet government gig.

The price I paid for my sweet government gig was being paid less than half what comparable private sector employees earned. I once consulted with a group of 16 employees who worked a project for 3 years that netted the government just over $16B.

That's billion, with a "b".

Their average pay was about $60K/year plus benefits. They got no bonus for bringing in that staggering sum. That sort of treatment was normal.

My sweet gig will only pay off if I live for quite a while more, since the only advantage I have over the private sector is that I earned a small pension and decent health insurance, both of which are unlikely to be threatened because my employer goes into bankruptcy.

I had to spend 30 years behind the earnings curve to get where I am now; I wouldn't call that a "sweet gig". It was a trade-off I made with my eyes open and if I live another 20 years, it'll turn out to have been the right choice, but please disabuse yourself of the notion that there are more than a small handful of federal jobs that can accurately be termed "sweet gigs." They just don't exist.

I retired a couple of years ago from a near-30 year career with the Internal Revenue Service.

People tried to kill me on more than one occasion. Dogs were set on me more times than I can remember. A man once openly threatened to kill me, in front of witnesses, while we were standing in a courthouse hallway, on a break, during a jury selection.

People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.

When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted.

Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.

Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS. Those of us who worked there had to adapt. It's possible.

To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."

You need an external DA converter that uses DSD to convert to analog, but that can accept PCM.

Maybe I'll buy one some day. For now, though, I don't want to buy new hardware. I like my Schiit Loki. That DAC, however, will only accept DSD files. Whatever I feed it must come to it via DoP.

So if I want to play my FLAC files, I'll need a player that converts PCM to DSD on the fly then sends that file to the DAC via DoP.

As for audio pebbles, I haven't tried them. My initial reaction is that they probably wouldn't work so I haven't tried them. However, if you have some good experimental data point me to it. Otherwise, I'll pass. Audiophilia nervosa is not a disease I intend to contract.

Thanks for the reply but I've seen that. Yes, MPD can handle DSD files these days. However, I have an outboard DAC that *only* accepts DSD files, a Schiit Loki. It's a great little DAC but to use it for my FLAC (for example) files, I need my player to convert PCM to DSD on the fly, then send the newly-created DSD file to the DAC via DoP.

On Windows, both JRiver and foobar can do that. On Linux, there is no FLOSS solution I know of; there's only the very expensive HQplayer.

BTW - There's absolutely no need to apologize for potentially wasting my time. I find your courtesy refreshing. Thank you.

I need a player that will convert PCM files to DSD and send them via DoP to an outboard DAC that converts DSD files, only.

On Linux, that means HQPlayer. It's expensive. The interface seems designed by someone who thinks about everything in a way that would never occur to me. But it does the job for now.

When there's an add-on for MPD that will do PCM-to-DSD for all files, I'll migrate to that.

If you're on Windows and have the same need as me and also need bit-perfect output via USB to your outboard DAC, your choices are JRiver and foobar.

Yes, because I would just love having to go through regulatory channels ...

No one would ever require that from small producers. After all, if you have just a couple of cows and want to sell a little raw milk and some craft cheese from your small farm, no one would ever interfere with that. That would be silly.

Oh. ... Wait. ...

Back when [unions] still had power though, they served a very good purpose for people in non-union shops - they made employers afraid of them. As a result, it was considered good business practice to treat employees well enough that they didn't want to unionize.

This.

A thousand times, this.

The whole "working your way through the courts" process can be radically shortened if you're willing to play the game. To wit:

1. File in Texas.
2. Claim less than $25 in damages.
3. Lose in small claims court.
4. Texas law provides ZERO appeals for cases this small, so
5. Go straight to the Supreme Court.

The SC has previously heard at least one notable case that got there through this mechanism.

I submit.

You work(ed?) in a situation where pissing off your coworkers would not cause you trouble. Few people are able to find positions where they can work in such splendid isolation. Since you're not a team player, your attitude is appropriate for you.

For those of us who must rely on others in our workgroup to get things done, life is different. The second best project I worked during my entire career was group-evaluated. We wrote our own evaluation and we all shared a single collective evaluation narrative. We informally evaluated each other every quarter in a frank, open meeting with all present. Annually, our official evaluation determined raises and ratings. In three years on that project, we gave ourselves raises twice but passed once because we faced the fact that the project had bogged and not met goals in that year. Making sure the entire team was happily working together was, obviously, *extremely* important.

Given our different experiences, I'd say we both have valid viewpoints, depending on circumstances.

Agreed?

Not caring what your co-workers think and deliberately pissing them off is a bigger ding on your evaluation than just a general comment about communication skills.

"Actively antagonizes others in workgroup" is not a good replacement for "could use improvement in communications skills".

...you might find you have to start filling out detailed weekly status reports...

I was in this situation once. My manager said he didn't have enough info on my day to day activities so he demanded a "detailed daily report" of what I was doing.

What's that old "Dungeons and Dragons" rule? Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a player is give them *exactly* what they ask for. I started churning out ~3 pages, single spaced, at the end of each day with excruciating detail of everything I did during the day.

In about 2 weeks, my boss told me he no longer needed status reports. After that, he let me write my own evaluations and he just signed them.