[446] in Humor
HUMOR: Lavender Hill Mob (1992 DB)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Sun Sep 11 11:08:43 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 1994 11:03:53 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
Dave Relates a Sorry Saga of the IRS
by Dave Barry
Sometimes, even though we love America, with its amber waves of purple
mounted majesties fruiting all over the plains, we get a little ticked
off at our government. Sometimes we find ourselves muttering: "All the
government ever seems to do is suck up our hard-earned money and spew it
out on projects such as the V-22 Osprey military aircraft, which the
Pentagon doesn't even WANT, & which tends to crash, but which Congress
has fought to spend millions on anyway, because this will help the re-
election efforts of certain congresspersons, who would cheerfully vote to
spend millions on a program to develop a working hemorrhoid, as long as
the money would be spent in their districts."
I mutter this frequently myself. But we must not allow ourselves to
become cynical. We must remember that for every instance of the
government's demonstrating the intelligence of a yam, there is also an
instance of the government's rising to the level of a far more complex
vegetable, such as a turnip.
Today I'm pleased to tell you the heart-warming story of a group of 10
men whose lives have been changed, thanks to prompt, coordinated
government action. I got this story from one of the men, Al Oliver, a
retired Navy chaplain. In fact, all 10 are retirees (or, in Al Oliver's
words, "chronologically disadvantaged").
The men live in the Azalea Trace retirement center in Pensacola, FL. For
years they've gathered every morning to drink coffee & talk. In 1988,
they formed a pact: Each would buy a Florida lottery ticket every week,
& if anybody won, they'd all split the money. They called themselves the
Lavender Hill Mob, & stamped that name on their lottery tickets.
For three years they won nothing. Then, in 1991, one of their tickets
had five out of six winning numbers, for a prize of $4,156. Oliver took
the ticket to the state lottery office in Pensacola, where he had to
fill out Form 5754, indicating who was to get the money. He wrote down
"Lavender Hill Mob."
A while later, he got the form back from the state, along with a letter
informing him that the Lavender Hill Mob was a partnership & could not be
paid until it obtained an Employer Identification Number, or EIN, from
(ominous music start here) ... the Internal Revenue Service.
At this point you readers are like an audience watching the scene in a
horror movie wherein the woman trapped alone in the house at night is
about to go down into the basement.
"NO! NO!" you're shouting to Al Oliver. "Don't get involved with the
IRS! Better to just throw the ticket away!"
But Oliver went to an IRS office & applied for the EIN by filling out
Form SS-4. "I had to list everything on all 10 of us except I believe
our cholesterol count," he recalls. The IRS then gave him the EIN, which
he sent along with Form 5754 to the state lottery, which sent him the
check, which he took to the bank, which, after balking a little, finally
gave him 10 cashier's checks for the Lavender Hill Mob members.
Now you're thinking: "OK, so it was an annoying bureaucratic hassle, but
everything turned out fine."
Please try not to be such a weinerhead. Of COURSE everything did not
turn out fine. In February, Oliver began receiving notices from the IRS
demanding to know where exactly the hell were the Lavender Hill Mob's
1065 forms showing partnership income for 1989, 1990, & 1991. So Oliver
went to his CPA, who filled out the forms with zeros & sent them in.
Of course this only angered the IRS, because here the Lavender Hill Mob
was just now getting around to filing forms for as far back as 1989,
which means these forms were LATE. You can't allow that kind of flagrant
disregard for the law. You let the Mob members slide on that, & the next
thing you know they're selling crack on the shuffleboard court.
So in June the IRS notified the Mob members that, for failing to file
their 1989 Form 1065 on time, they owed a penalty of $2,500. Oliver's
CPA, who is not working for free, wrote a letter to the IRS attempting to
explain everything. Then in July, the Mobsters got another notice,
informing them that they owed $2,500 PLUS $19.20 in interest charges,
which will of course continue to mount. The notice states that the
government may file a tax lien against the Mobsters, and adds: "WE MUST
ALSO CONSIDER TAKING YOUR WAGES, PROPERTY, OR OTHER ASSETS."
That's where it stood when I last heard from Oliver. Since this whole
thing is obviously a simple misunderstanding, we can safely assume that
it will never be resolved. The wisest course for the Mobsters would be
to turn all their worldly goods over to the government right now.
Because if they keep attempting to file the correct form, they're going
to wind up in serious trouble, fleeing through the swamps around
Pensacola, pursued by airborne IRS agents in the new V-22 Osprey,
suspended via steel cables from some aircraft that can actually fly.
(C) 1992 The Miami Herald
