Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey

himself so stiffly erect and his body had been hardened from his four-hour daily workouts. Culpepper’s passion was bodybuilding, his profession mind-molding. His uniform that morning consisted of suit by Brooks Brothers, tie by Armani, shoes by Nunn Bush, hair gel by Sassoon. His nails shone from a fresh manicure. He waved us toward the chairs but he himself remained standing. He slid one stack of file folders before Allison and another stack in front of me. Then, with no preamble whatsoever, he said, “I don’t intend to teach you anything. What you need to know about tradecraft can be easily learned by reading the manual, reviewing your training material, or consulting with SPf. [6] In this sense, ‘instructor’ is a misnomer. I am your trainer. My job is to prepare you to succeed. Whether you actually succeed is, of course, entirely up to you.”
    He paced around the table as he talked, completing a circuit, pausing at the head of the table, his starting point, then beginning again, moving in the opposite direction. He reminded me of Robert De Niro as Al Capone in
The Untouchables,
circling the dining table with the baseball bat.
    “I’ve read your personnel files. I have every confidence one of you has what it takes to make an outstanding revenue officer. About the other, I have my doubts.” He gave no indication who he thought was doomed. I felt he didn’t need to. My face burned with shame even as Allison turned her eyes toward me. She felt he didn’t need to either. “But I’ve been wrong before. Once. These are your cases. As you know, you only have thirty days to make initial contact on each. That isn’t much time. You’ll have one hour to choose the five that need immediate contact, and then we go.”
    “Go where?” Allison had the temerity to ask.
    “To the field.”
    “We’re going to the field… today?”
    “We hired you to be field officers,” Culpepper said. “If you wanted to sit behind a desk and talk on the phone you should have applied for ACS [7] . He resumed his route around the table. ”As you review these cases, I want you to keep one thing in the forefront of your mind: you are a revenue officer now. Whatever you were on the outside before you came here doesn’t exist anymore. You are a revenue officer. What does that mean? That means you are the last stop on the line. There is no step in the system after the revenue officer. Keep in mind that these people have had many opportunities to resolve their tax issues before their case landed in your inventory. We’ve sent them notices, we’ve mailed them letters, we’ve called them on the phone, and still they are waiting for us—they are waiting for
you.
And you are going to give them exactly what they expect.“
    Allison spoke. “What do they expect?”
    He paused, turned his icy-blue eyes upon her, and she actually flinched. I caught myself sinking lower into my chair and willed myself to sit erect.
    “When I first came on board, a senior revenue officer took me aside and showed me a sign someone had made. He kept this sign hidden in his desk, because if it was seen outside his desk he would have been reprimanded. You will learn there are things you may say and things you may not say, and it is those things you may not say that are the essence of your work here.”
    He sat at the head of the table and laced his fingers together. The silence dragged out until I couldn’t take it any longer.
    “What did the sign say?” I asked.
    “It was entitled ‘The Four Protocols,’” Culpepper said, still looking at Allison. “They are the rules that we may not say.” He counted the Four Protocols on his fingers. “Find where they are. Track what they do. Learn what they have. Execute what they fear.”
    William Culpepper was a native Floridian, raised in the comfort of suburbia. He attended a small, private university near Miami, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and after graduation moved north