I Remember Each of My Audits...

I've been asked a time or two why I'm so indelibly strident in my dislike of all things "Big Government."  And Medium-Sized Government.  And even Small-ish Government.  And the answer is:

"Because I was audited 11 of my 38 years in business." 

I remember each of those eleven escrutiating IRS audits vividly. 

                               VIVIDLY!

My wife and I were entrepreneurs, which means we just had to work for ourselves.  So we started a little specialty fast-response medical services company in the then-free Country of Orange, California in 1979.    

On April 20th, BTW.  Just a happy coincidence.  Very happy...

Anyway, we ran our company for over 38 years.  During which we had as many as 5 specialty Nephrologist Medical Doctors on the payroll, and 50+ Registered Nurses working for us, and several Technicians keeping our highly-specialized blood purification equipment humming, and a couple of trucks delivering it to our local hospital clients at all hours of the day and night.  

During that time we treated more than 10,000 desperately and acutely-ill patients in 40 hospitals.  With a guaranteed, 2-hour response time.  Across L. A. traffic.

In short, a Big-ish Small Bizzzness.  Or a small-ish Big Bizzzness.  You decide.

Our patients loved us.  Our client hospitals loved us.  And our employees loved us.  You know who didn't love us?

                                The IRS!

Even though we had our Certified Public Accountants prepare both our personal and our company tax returns for every year we were in business, at an enormous $cost, BTW, we were audited 11 of those 38 years.  Whatever we sent them just wasn't enough, doncha' know.  Or, they just wanted us to knuckle under to their dictats and give them a bunch more of our $Money.  But we believed - and I still believe - that we should pay the Gubmint every dollar it is due, and not a dollar more.  So they'd send us a little love note letting us know they'd be out to visit in a few short weeks. They'd be bringing their greedy paws to paw over boxes of receipts, so we had to gird our loins and prepare for battle.

Dedicating even more of our time to try and defend ourselves against their attempts to pry open our piggy bank.  Each of these audits cost us $Thousands.  More Good $Money after Bad.

Now then, I don't mean to complain, but in each and every one of those cases the auditor who chose to visit us was a...get ready for it...tiny little, very young and very green, Vietnamese female.  Usually cute ones, BTW.  Usually weighing in at at 90 pounds or less.  All speaking a language remarkably similar to English, but not quite.  Making understanding them an added feature of our almost annual audits.  Especially once we started pulling in the $Major Bucks.  

Perhaps the local IRS office had only Vietnamese young babes as its employees.  Or maybe they were all members of the same family.  Or maybe they just thought that it would somehow either soften up bizzness types like me, being a Viet Nam War veteran, or enrage me, or cause me to write a check.  I simply do not know.  Nor did I ever learn.  Just one of the Major Road Blocks associated with doing bizz in Taxifornia.

However, I'm please to report that the Score Card for those 11 audit contests is as follows:

*     The Chuckmeister & Family   -   9

*     The Infernal Revenue Service   -  2

And if memory serves the result of all those individual audits over the years was a net-net of $129,000+ to Me and Mine.  Even after hiring attorneys and all the incidental costs.  And the years I lost?  Yeah, well, we wrote checks totaling $1,545.00 for those two years to make things right.

I'd say our accountants did okay by us, right?  Although I pissed and moaned a bit over having to write those checks...  

Now do you understand why I hold the IRS, and the Federal Gubmint writ large, in such disdain?  We live in a State which penalizes success by picking its pocket.  So that the money can be spread among losers and hangers-on.

As my entrepreneur Dad liked to say about the IRS, "They're a rabid pack of bottom-feeding thieves."  And we're now hiring another 87,000 of these pirates, all equipped with firearms, BTW.  We, you and me, just spent $1,500,000,000 (that's with a "B") to pay for those firearms.  

I'd like to remind my Fellow Patriots at about this time that only 48.8% of our citizenry pay income taxes.  Those $Dollars our Country uses to build stuff and buy stuff and defend ourselves.  Less than One in Two.  Don't you think it's about time we rewrote our laws so that Every Single American pays Federal Taxes?  However small a contribution it would insure we all had some of that figurative "skin in the game."  

But until or less that happens, I'd like to leave this unassuming little blog posting right about here with this comment:  

                        Screw the IRS!

And oh yeah, screw the Gubmint!

P.S.   So for those who want me to say something nice about our Gubmint drones, in the interest of fairness, doncha' know, I'd say they don't sweat much for fat people...