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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Threats, contempt come with job for IRS workers Some Americans heckle or mail tea bags; others, such as Stack, act in more dangerous ways. Michelle Lowry knows first-hand how much people hate the Internal Revenue Service. The 37-year-old Leander woman, who processes forms for the IRS in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and pushpins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included — what else? — tea bags with their returns. And then there's the weird stuff. "Sometimes you'll see stuff that looks like blood on them," said Lowry, who has worked as a seasonal employee for five years. "We wear gloves." Americans love to hate the IRS. The federal agency charged with making sure Uncle Sam gets his cut breeds contempt and resentment from nearly every walk of life. On Feb. 18, Joe Stack — an Austin man with a decades-long bitterness toward the agency — crashed his private plane into a North Austin office building that housed IRS employees, killing himself and 68-year-old IRS worker Vernon Hunter. It was an extreme version of the ire directed at the agency. Each year, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees the IRS, investigates more than 900 threats made against IRS employees. Between 2001 and 2008, those threats resulted in 195 court convictions. In 2008, for example, Randy Nowak of Mulberry, Fla. was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill the IRS employee auditing Nowak's taxes. The IRS also has a "Potentially Dangerous Taxpayer" list that includes the names, addresses and case histories of people who have threatened, assaulted, harassed or otherwise interfered with the duties of IRS employees. IRS spokesman Clay Sanford said he could not discuss how many people are on that list or whether Stack had been designated a potentially dangerous taxpayer. Most IRS employees never encounter violence. But IRS employees are constantly exposed to other people's contempt for their profession. Christopher Jenkins, who worked as a seasonal employee for the agency last year and is now a salesperson at Nordstrom, said he learned how to how to spot suspicious packages or bombs during his time with the IRS. He also read "long-winded letters about why people thought they were being wronged," he said. "I think it's very easy for someone to hate the IRS as a non-human entity and hate what it represents in their life," said Jenkins, 23. "They forget that a human being somewhere is going to open their hate mail." Lowry is used to the presence of security guards at the IRS office in which she works. She's been through evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder. (It turned out to be packing material.) And while she has always known the risks of her job, she wasn't concerned about her safety until now. "I'm a little worried, honestly," she said. "Every time I walk into the building, I'm going to think about it." Austinite Jesse Pangelinan, 41, never felt threatened during his 13 years at the IRS. He said it wasn't until after he left the agency in 2000 to become a stand-up comedian that he came face to face with true IRS rage. After he joked about his former job at a comedy club in Ardmore, Okla., one audience member heckled Pangelinan so badly that the heckler had to be removed from the building. "I was escorted back to my car in case he followed me," said Pangelinan, who also works at an insurance company in Austin. "The security guard followed me back to my hotel." Lowry said she has heard everything from silly remarks ("Can you lose my tax return?") to disbelief ("Oh my God, I can't believe you work there.") She's heard tirades and sob stories. IRS officials are "taking additional security measures in the Austin area," said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union in Washington, D.C., which represents 85,000 IRS workers across the country. She did not detail what they were. Lowry said that when she went to work this weekend at her office in South Austin, she saw two SUVs marked "security" at the entrance — something she had not seen before the plane crash. Kelley, who met with Austin employees after the attack, said she was impressed with how well workers were dealing with the tragedy. The IRS is providing counseling for employees who need it following the plane crash. "I know that these employees face many hard days ahead but what I saw was their spirit, their strength and their resilience," Kelley wrote in an e-mail to the Statesman. "It is clear that they care deeply for one another." KUT radio personality Bob Branson, who retired as a IRS spokesman 12 years ago after 21 years with the agency, says anger at IRS employees is misguided. "These are people trying to enforce incredibly complex and frequently incredibly unpopular laws," said Branson, 70. "Enforcing the law has to be done by someone, but keep in mind, these are not the people who make the laws... They're doing a job that needs to be done."
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