A day for all to celebrate

PETER BUFFA

Friday was Tax Day. Like you didn’t know that.

Sure it’s depressing, but it’s a great American tradition -- long

lines at the post office, frantic people trying to beat the clock, TV

reporters asking them why they waited until the last minute, people

punching TV reporters. I like it.

Want some useless tax facts? Don’t thank me. It’s my job.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes.

God knows you’ve heard it, but who said it? Ben Franklin did, in a

letter he wrote on Nov. 13, 1789, to a man named Jean-Baptiste Leroy,

who was French. What Ben really said was: “Our new Constitution is

now established and has an appearance that promises permanency, but

in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and

taxes.”

Ben Franklin was very smart.

April 15 is known best, and disliked most, as Tax Day, but there

are other reasons to avoid it if you can. President Lincoln died at

7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865. The Titanic sank, with band playing on,

at 2:27 a.m. on April 15, 1912.

It’s not a bad day in Italy though. Leonardo da Vinci was born on

April 15, and more importantly, so was Claudia Cardinale.

Taxes have been around since before time began, which was ages

ago, but the first income tax was levied in England in 1404. In this

country, the first income tax was imposed in 1862 to pay for the

Civil War, but it didn’t become permanent until 1913 in the form of

the 16th Amendment.

It costs the IRS $3 to collect every $100 in taxes.

This year, Laura Bush and her husband, George, paid $207,307 in

taxes on income of $784,219, which is more than I make. Lynne Cheney

and her husband, Dick, paid $393,518 in taxes on income of $2.17

million, which is more than I make.

Do you know where the word “audit” comes from? Wait, let me tell

you. In medieval England, when the tax collector came around, which

was a lot, everyone lined up and paid their taxes in coin.

The taxman sat at a table that had a checkered design on it -- a

sort of early adding machine. People stepped up to the table one at a

time and tossed their coins into a metal bowl. The taxman could tell

from the sound of each coin hitting the bowl whether or not it was

real.

If you tried to slip a phony coin in there, the assistant tax

collector would pull you aside and explain what the term “beat you

like a bongo” meant. The Latin word for “hearing” is “auditus,” and

the business of listening for fake money became known as an “audit.”

Can you get this kind of information anywhere else? I don’t see

how. By the way, that checkered design on the tax collector’s table

is why the British name for tax collector is “exchequer.”

The most misused and abused Social Security number of all time? No

contest. It was 078-05-1120, and it belonged to a woman named Hilda

Schrader Whitcher.

In 1938, Woolworth and Sears starting selling wallets made by the

E.H. Ferree Company of Lockport, N.Y. E.H. Ferree’s vice president,

Douglas Patterson, had an idea. He suggested putting a fake family

photo and a faux Social Security card in every wallet to show off the

different compartments.

Apparently, the Social Security card, which had number 078-05-1120

on it but no name, looked a little too real. Over the years,

thousands of people working on their tax returns reached for their

wallets to find their Social Security card and carefully wrote down

078-05-1120. The IRS stopped counting how many times that number was

mistakenly used after some 40,000 returns.

So who was Hilda Whitcher? She was a nice lady who lived in

Lockport, N.Y., and worked at the E.H. Ferree Company -- as Douglas

Patterson’s secretary.

The peak year of the “Hilda problem” at the IRS was 1943, when

5,755 people filed tax returns with her number on them. But as late

as 1977, a handful of returns with Hilda’s number were still coming

in.

“How can people can be so stupid?” she said. “I just can’t

understand that.”

Hilda was a woman of few words.

She would have had even more trouble understanding Abbott and

Costello and Willie Nelson. They each made millions of dollars, and

they were all wiped out by tax problems.

Abbott and Costello had a crooked manager, who pocketed almost all

the money they thought had paid in taxes for more than 20 years, and

they declared bankruptcy in 1957. Lou Costello died in 1959,

virtually broke, and Bud Abbott was destitute when he died in a rest

home in 1974.

In 1990, Willie Nelson got clobbered with a bill from the IRS for

$32 million over a sketchy tax shelter. Willie and the tax boys

settled for $16.7 million, which is much better.

When Nelson had to sell off almost everything he owned; Kris

Kristofferson and some other pals bought everything they could and

gave it back to Willie.

They also sent a letter to the IRS saying that, being a national

treasure, “Willie Nelson should be exempt from taxes,” to which the

IRS said something like, “Umm, yeah. We’ll get back to you on that.”

Nelson did his part, though, releasing a double album in 1994

called “The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?” with all the profits

going to you-know-who.

The biggest what-were-you-thinking tax dodger? Also no contest. In

1948, a man named Joseph Nunan won $1,800 on a private bet that Harry

Truman would win the Presidential election. Nunan never declared his

winnings and was convicted of tax evasion four years later.

That wouldn’t have gotten much attention, except that for the fact

that from 1944 t o 1947, Joseph Nunan was the commissioner of the

IRS.

It’s simple, really. Mother Nature and Uncle Sam ... don’t fool

with either of them.

I gotta go.

* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs

Sundays. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].