The minister was coming to visit. Brian O Nuallain, alias Myles na Gopaleen and Flann O'Brien, had to be kept from view. He was under the weather, and already on his last excuse. Civil servants hatched a plan. The minister would take the lift while Myles was being escorted down the back stairs; then they'd swap them round.
But neither Myles nor the minister played ball.
As one took the lift, the other waited for it on the floor above. As one was ushered down the back stairs instead, the other decided to do a quick inspection for himself.
Doors opened and closed, heads popped around corners, civil servants became Keystone Cops, and the whole episode took on the form of a Buster Keaton slapstick where everyone finally got to slip on a banana skin.
Except Myles and the minister, who engaged in a classic parody of mistaken identity where Myles thought the minister was a funny solicitor from Cahirciveen, and the minister thought Myles was an expert on land title.
The civil servants were cleaning up for months.
That story may not be true, but it once impressed me. I heard it as a young Administrative Officer working in a central government department before the period now exposed in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on abuses of DIRT tax and how they were not policed by the relevant authorities.
Myles was part of a private morality too explosive to be let loose. Yet the swamping of public sector ethics by a private morality built on sand is Mylesian in the extreme.
How else to term the practices whereby bogus account-holders and other so-called investors were given effective protection by the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners and the Central Bank for a period of at least 12 years?
The C&AG's report places a large and ironic question mark under the notion of "Mise, le meas" (with respect) that summed up what we had been led to expect from our public servants. This was not respect, it was disdain. Civil servants are obligated to their political masters, but are protected by statute from being at the whim of political interests or being subject to due process for certain errors of judgment or fact.
In turn, they are supposed to be honourable: their core mission is to steer a balanced course, whatever changing political winds are blowing. This is the real exchange rate that allows democracy to function.
Letting loose the idea that paying tax was for eejits would have disrupted the principle of a fair and balanced Civil Service on which the morality of the public sector is founded.
It would have suggested that the gatekeepers on whose impartiality we must rely operated an admission policy as shady as some bouncers in Dublin clubs: if they like the look of you, you're allowed to skip the queue.
These unnamed individuals who looked good to senior civil servants were treated like financial artists entitled to tax exemption purely on the grounds that they had more money than the rest of us, and, given the special treatment they received, were bound to become even wealthier. The nature of their artistry is questionable. But the tacit suggestion that this secret policy actually contributed to the broader ecology of social and economic growth experienced over the same period is more so.
Using a top-down approach, privileged individuals were given a latitude simply unimaginable to anyone who worked elsewhere in the public service at that time.
In the same period, a secret and private morality operated within central government agencies which was hostile to the public ethics they claimed to enforce.
The scale is staggering. Estimates are already reaching £10 billion.
I imagine I am not alone in wondering why the smaller departments, State-sponsored, semi-State and voluntary sectors were so rigidly put through their financial paces or in speculating about what we could all have achieved with even a small percentage of the revenue left uncollected at that time.
As a contracted public servant in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had to get approval from a government-appointed board of 17 people to authorise a grant of £30 to transport an exhibition from Dublin to Kenmare.
The administration cost more than the grant.
Skipping the queue seems to be one of the core non-principles on which aspects of economic policy, or what passed for them, were founded.
Specifically, the god which justified such a sacrifice of basic principle was allegedly the rate of exchange, an economic force about as predictable as the form in Cheltenham's Gold Cup.
The Central Bank governor, Maurice O'Connell, a former senior Finance official, explained quite disingenuously that the idea was not to rock the boat, that same leaky vessel of international exchange rates.
It's interesting that the report's editorial decision to highlight his words coincides with his own and his Bank's vulnerability in the wake of the report by Michael McDowell, now Attorney General.
Of course, naming other civil servants, and naming the bogus account-holders, would be in breach of the Civil Service's own establishment laws, as well as the libel laws.
And tax evasion is still not a criminal offence. In different legal waters, these offences might be termed piracy.
SOME civil servants are smarter than the individuals they serve. In this case, the impact of the C&AG report is minimised by allowing its publication to coincide with the announcement of the new national plan, with the announcement of changed policy and powers for the Revenue Commissioners, and with the Dail recess, which limits the possibilities for debate.
Longer-term, the episode casts a long shadow over the ability of the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners and the Central Bank to cope with the global arenas now in play.
Global markets mean the only viable future role a government can take is that of regulation, given that financial interests and markets are already more powerful and extensive than national groupings.
If the central financial agencies failed for whatever reason to regulate an identifiable class of financial abusers, than the prospects that they will be able to become main players in the forthcoming regulation game are minimal.
Myles was eventually sacked from his job as a civil servant. He got a job in this newspaper. Yet there is in this context a certain charm to the letter he apparently sent to his superior after years of quiet frustration.
"A chara," he wrote, "F..K off."