LETTER FROM AMERICA: I have, perhaps foolishly and unlike any American I know, a somewhat benign view of the dread Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I'm still, two years on, extracting myself from the clutches of the Belgian tax system and have found the mercifully small cheques my accountant has suggested I owe the IRS almost a pleasure to write. Almost.
My cheque and Form 1040 went off in the post 10 days ago, well ahead of Monday's deadline for filing both tax returns or the equally popular deadline extension requests (automatically granted to August 15th).
But apparently some one million neighbours of mine in the Washington metropolitan area simply can not bring themselves to do it until the last day.
And so, on Monday, in celebration of what is almost a national festival of procrastination, from Washington State to DC, huge lines formed at post-offices as hundreds of thousands of crazed filers pored over their forms for one last minute and shoved them at weary postal workers for dating.
Major post offices stay open this one night every year until 11.59 p.m. to accommodate this mad rush and counters are filled with piles of half-completed forms and crowded out by demented souls muttering to each other about "IRAs" (Individual Retirement Accounts) and other "deductables".
Some post offices even provide drive-by services, sending staff out into the street with large bins to receive the precious bundles on the road so drivers need not even leave their cars. Not far from here, in Potomac Mills, the postal service gave seven-minute massage certificates to the first 100 in the queue, while in Florida two local politicians actually brought masseurs to the queuers.
In Manhattan, last-minute filers were swamped by anti-tax demonstrators and actors (clothed) advertising a new nude show. In Cincinnatti, a radio station raised funds for charity by parking an old Dodge outside the main postal facility, offering stressed taxpayers the chance to hit "The Tax Dodge" with a sledgehammer for a dollar. There were lots of takers.
In more than one state local politicians used the occasion of such gatherings to campaign for tax reductions, as did the President in DC.
Mr Bush got his 1040 in on time, filing before the weekend. He reported $811,100 in adjusted gross income for last year and paid $250,202 in federal income taxes, the White House announced. Apparently the Bushes reported total itemised deductions of $99,647 - $82,700 (12 per cent of his income) of which were donations to churches and other charities.
Mr Bush used an accountant but most of the 132 million expected to file still take a perverse pride in filling in the form themselves.
The White House Budget Office estimates that the public spends a total of 1.2 billion hours every year on tax forms, while the National Taxpayers' Union puts the average taxpayer's lost hours at 20 hours and six minutes, 40 per cent more than 1997.
Then there's the dreaded audit, when the IRS man gives you a personal interview and demands justification for every nickel spent and claimed. Woe betide you if there's anything amiss.
Mind you, it appears that the taxman's bark is worse than his bite. According to the latest figures manpower shortage meant that in 2000 the IRS audited just 0.49 per cent - one in 200 - of individual tax returns filed, less than a third of the level of returns audited in 1996.
The drop was especially sharp among high-income taxpayers, or those making $100,000 or more. The audit rate fell from 3.21 per cent in 1996 to 0.96 per cent in 2000.
In testimony to Congress last week the IRS claimed that up to 700,000 people are not paying their taxes at all or deliberately underpaying them at a cost of tens of billions to the state.
And although only 170,000 tax returns filed in 2000 reported an offshore account, the IRS estimates as many as two million Americans have them and put the potential cost of offshore evasion at up to $40 billion.
Another 62,000 Americans are thought to be filing so-called frivolous returns, which use discredited pseudo-legalistic arguments to support the position that the taxpayer doesn't owe anything to Uncle Sam.
The total value of these claims is about $1.8 billion, although the government is detecting many of them and pursuing collection. On Monday - nice irony that - an anti-tax activist was charged with fraud for promulgating just such schemes at a considerable profit.
But sometimes the IRS pays out on such claims and there were very red faces in the service when the Washington Post reported on Saturday that the organisation had paid out some $30 million in erroneous refunds in 2000 and 2001 on one particular scam, applications for non-existent slavery tax credits.
Many of the mistaken payments, including one to a former IRS employee, were for $43,209. That's the figure Essence magazine suggested in an article on the subject in 1993 as being the updated value of 40 acres and a mule, which some freed slaves were given under an order by a Union general during the Civil War.
One hundred thousand claims for the "reparation credit" totalled $2.7 billion in 2001 alone, an IRS spokesman said. The claims had their origins in the activities of fraudsters who would charge blacks for help in formulating claims for the ficticious payments, but then acquired a life of their own. The tax agency is now trying to recover the money it paid out, though officials would not disclose how much has been collected.
