For Tax Purposes
by Sarah Zettel
Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr.
“Ms. Fowler, defrauding the Internal Revenue Service is still a serious offense.” The last IRS employee in the Chicago district drew his shoulders back and tried to put some fire in his voice.
The woman on the other side of the video screen wasn’t fooled or impressed. Her voice remained as precise as the cut of her suit. “I posted my acquisition of a dependent according to regulations, Mr. Burns. This entitles me to a reduced rate of witholding.”
“As of last year, Dale Rivera,” Burns glanced at his desk top where a flat screen displayed the pertinent data, “was forty-six years old and earning a full income as a private investigator. What is your justification for claiming him as a dependent?”
“If you bothered to do your research, Mr. Burns, you’d know.” Ms. Fowler leaned forward and touched her own keyboard. The screen flicked to black.
Zedekiah Emmanuel Burns the Fifth slumped as far backwards as his orthopedically correct chair would allow and rubbed his eyes.
God, I miss paper.
Kiah opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. The afternoon Sun still tried to stream through the windows at his back, but was caught in the filter layer so as not to cast any glare on the series of screens and keypads embedded in the circular, artificial-wood desk. The pale grey wall that divided his office from his living room still carried the sign reading PEOPLE WILL NEVER BE OBSOLETE.
Kiah wasn’t sure why he kept that sign. He certainly didn’t believe it.
The first Zedekiah Emmanuel Burns had made his way from Ellis Island to Michigan and got a job with General Motors. Every Zedekiah after him had worked in the same plant, until the automation revolution sent the assembly line the way of the dinosaur.
Kiah’s clearest memory of his father was of him hunched on the sofa the day the last manned line shut down. He could still see veins standing out on the backs of his permanently crooked hands.
“You’re goin’ to school, Kiah Five. You’re gettin’ yourself a job with the IRS. Whatever else happens, there’s always gonna be taxes.”
Kiah Five had done as he was told. His father had lived to see him become a senior investigative agent.
Then, the First World Economic Treaty abolished hard currency. Computer networks handled all transactions. Monetary exchange became a matter of instructing the computer to deduct an amount from one account and simultaneously add it to another. Each transaction was sent to the treasury department system, which categorized the exchange and measured it against the records of the participants. The computer deducted the proper amount of tax from the appropriate party’s account. All dubious transactions were referred instantly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If anyone had a problem, they could take the US government to court, a proceeding which seldom worked out for the plaintiff, since the government still had more lawyers than anybody else.
The Change Over had allowed President Aubrey to all but abolish the IRS, a move which won her the next election. A skeleton bureau had been left behind to deal with emergencies. The term “tax time” vanished from the vocabulary. Kiah kept his job on the basis of seniority—barely.
After a few weak protests, he resigned himself to a life of dealing with things the automated systems couldn’t handle, like misspelled names, forgotten ID numbers on record updates, or the occasional question about withholding status.
For a brief moment, today had looked like it was going to be different. Kiah had walked into the office to find the message UNABLE TO NEGOTIATE TRANSACTION blazing in red on his main screen. His heart had been in his mouth as he lowered himself into his chair. His finger shook as he touched the return key.
What? What is it? Some cracker try to get into the treasury lines? Somebody try to change their status through a back door? Visions of Al Capone’s sneering face danced in front of his mind’s eye. Did somebody actually try to duck the automated systems?
The first few lines of information sobered him up part of the way. There weren’t any gangsters or crackers. A woman named Louisa Fowler (ID number 013-84-0129-0) had declared she had acquired a dependent, a mature man named Dale Rivera (ID number 408-19-6314-7), without even declaring him to be living with her.
Faced with either the most blatant case of fraud since the Change Over, or with a major typing error, Zedekiah Emmanuel Burns the Fifth, duly authorized investigative agent of the Internal Revenue Service, placed a call to Ms. Fowler’s home, which was also her workplace, and was told to go away.
What made it worse was the fact that she had been right. He should have at least checked some background of the situation, if only to find out why she tried to classify Rivera as a dependent and not a POSSLQ—Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.
Kiah swiveled his chair around to face the windows. There were still plenty of people around who remembered when the IRS had been a terror comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. They found endless delight in avenging themselves on its remaining human representatives. Ms. Fowler was probably one of them. She had the right look in her eyes. She was probably chuckling over the idea of the balding agent trying to work out her typing error.
Well, even if it is a wild goose chase, it’s something to do. I’ll go talk to Marian.
A small rack on the desk held his virtual reality gear: a shiny black visor that looked like a pair of wrap-around sunglasses with earmuffs attached, and two thick gloves. Light and sound dimmed as he settled the goggles over his eyes. The gloves were a little too small for his thick fingers. Kiah fumbled for the pre-set key on the desk top, and pressed it.
His office vanished. Mahogany shelves crammed with books engulfed him. Kiah’s imagination supplied the smell of dust and old paper. Directly in front of him stretched a wooden counter piled with books to be checked back into the library. Behind it, a slender woman in a stylized, nineteenth-century dress took notes from a massive dictionary. She smiled at Kiah and straightened up.
“And what can I do for you today, Mr. Burns?”
At one point, Kiah had been in love with Marian. He’d seen a psychiatrist about it, until he’d started falling in love with her and she suggested he go back to the simulation.
“I need the background records on Louisa Fowler and Dale Rivera.” He gave their ID numbers. “Specifically, I need to know their current tax and living status and why Ms. Fowler is trying to claim Mr. Rivera as a dependent, if you please, Miss Marian.”
Marian’s pencil flew across her pad. “I’m sure we have what you need. If you’ll excuse me a minute, I’ll go look this up.” She flashed him another smile and disappeared between the shelves.
Kiah’s heart flipped over and he sighed at the reaction. Nothing but a computer program based on a musical he’d never seen. Marian wasn’t even the whole program, she was just the interface. As soon as he had stated his question, the program had determined which databases would need to be accessed and wrote a series of sub-programs that the software engineers called “knowbots.” Each know-bot scurried to its appropriate destination, bridging whatever protocols lay between Kiah’s central processor and their goal. If necessary, the knowbots wrote their own smaller knowbots to help out. The other nickname for the program was a “flea generator.”
Once the outside database had been contacted and the data request relayed, the information would be poured into Kiah’s home unit, where it would be sorted and reshaped to answer his question. Supposedly, the program could access any public database and, because Kiah still had authority as an IRS investigator, a large number of private ones as well. He’d never had cause or curiosity to put the thing to any real test.