Most of today’s youth cannot comprehend a world before the touch tone phone where a basic adding machine cost north of $400. Heck, most of today’s youth don’t even know what a touch tone phone is. Well, this story takes place during that time you cannot imagine. Such is the time when this story takes place. While I was a child I was old enough to understand the story I heard. I do not remember the name of the actual farmer, but he didn’t live far. Back then farmers didn’t travel very far. A once a year trip to some place else visiting distant relatives maybe but traveling far and wide communicating with many others simply wasn’t done. It wasn’t that we had anything against it. Quite simply everybody had livestock which had to be fed and watered twice per day not to mention turned out each morning and locked up each nite to protect it from wild dogs, coyotes and such.
Old farmers believed in doing everything themselves. Oh, they might go to the dealership to buy a part for some piece of equipment, but having the dealer send out a mechanic to fix your tractor or combine, that was a sin. You couldn’t that until you spent at least a week trying to do it yourself with the help of 1-2 neighbors. If it was beyond the group of you, nobody would call you out for letting the dealership work on it.
Yes, I know. Today’s click a button and have the world delivered to me culture may find it hard to believe such a time or culture existed. Well, you’ve got a lot to learn kid. There was a time when men were actually men and they didn’t aspire to be Wall Street criminals. Where what you did was an extension of what you were.
Preparing taxes was and still is a complicated thing, especially for farmers. Today most visit a tax professional who uses some kind of tested software. I remember as a kid seeing these wide paperback income and expense ledgers. When folded out one took up almost the entire long side of our kitchen table. There would be much hollering and frustration as people tried to get everything entered correctly just so they could start the wonderful process of filling out the actual tax forms.
It should come as no surprise that there was always great concern about having done it correctly. The concern rose every year and it seemed every few years there was a story going around about some farm family put out of business by an IRS audit.
Farmer Fred was always worried. He wasn’t the best with numbers and figures and he didn’t own one of those fancy and expensive adding machines. Back then there was either a toll free number or a mailing address people could use to request an audit of themselves. I do not know if it exists today. Farmer Fred got so worried about having done his taxes wrong, he called the number. At some point the IRS got back to him and scheduled a time for him to come in and told him what documentation to bring.
While it seems unthinkable today, a good many people availed themselves of this service from the IRS. This truly was a service. As difficult as it may be to envision today, small towns and rural communities did not have ready access to tax preparation people. The people who performed these audits really were there to help. Today you have tax preparation store fronts popping up all over the country when tax time draws near, but it wasn’t true then.
Farmer Fred showed up at the time and place he was told. He had boxes of paperwork with him. He was sweating like he was bailing hay in August, but he knew he needed help. His worst fears were confirmed. He was filling out his taxes incorrectly. He was drastically overpaying the government. Reports very as to just how far back the IRS went. Some say it was 5, others say it was 7 years. All of the stories agree on one thing. At the end of the audit the Federal government owed Fred and his family $35,000.
You need a bit of information to understand just how much money that was. Minimum wage was somewhere between $2.50-$3.00/hr. A fully loaded Caprice Classic cost roughly $4,000. Gasoline was well under $1/gallon. You all have heard of dollar stores but back then we had dime stores where you could sometimes find a 3-pack of comic books for a dime. Not second hand, new.
Is anyone surprised that Fred contacted the IRS the following year for an audit and they never got back to him?
