Send Him Your Checks

By Hugh Sidey

In one respect he is the second most important man in the U.S. Government. If he were to fail totally, American society would be thrown into chaos, and the nation would soon stand helpless before its enemies. Ronald Reagan may not even know this man's name, since the two have met only a few times in conferences. Dan Rather would probably not recognize him if they shared a phone booth.

In biblical times, those who handled his kind of work were occasionally stoned to death. Robin Hood and his Merry Men may have put many an arrow into the rumps of this fellow's medieval predecessors. The most famous of his kind, France's devious voluptuary Nicolas Fouquet, was clapped into jail by Louis XIV, who rightly smelled a rat when he visited Fouquet's magnificent Vaux-le-Vicomte, a chateau that put the Sun King's palaces to shame. King Louis healed the insult by building Versailles.

Reagan has no such problem with Roscoe Egger, commissioner of Internal Revenue, the man who gathers 75% of the nation's money. In an Administration that often is all thumbs, some of them sticky, Egger is squeaky clean. Over the past three years, a few obtuse White House aides have called up for a little inside information. Egger has reminded them of the Watergate days, and the inquiries dried up instantly. In an Administration that can't seem to manage a peace-keeping force or a budget, Egger is transforming tax administration against terrible odds and is on his way to being recognized both inside and outside the IRS as the best commissioner yet. Reagan should give him a medal.

Under Egger the short form really is short.

His toughness has helped to slow those tax-protest groups that refuse to file. Cheaters and finaglers still abound; hiding income and dreaming up new evasions and shelters, they will rob the country of $90 billion or more this year. They are still gaining on Egger, but he believes that with more simplification and computerization he can one day hold his own.

For the dubious honor, Egger makes $70,800 a year and has the odd pleasure of living all the time among the tax tables. He loves it. He is one of the world's great orderers, sorters and Roscoe Egger waiting for returns storers of paper, and the IRS process ranks

among the top challenges to modern computer designers. Though IRS woes are well catalogued, less understood is the fact that the U.S. tax system remains the most efficient of any major society's, costing only 470 to raise each $100. Egger hopes that in a year or two all forms will be read by optical scanners and instantly checked, a development that may terrorize the wicked into righteousness.

In the past few days the tide of tax money that swells with the spring reached its peak, and by this Monday--filing deadline for most Americans--the U.S. was well on its way to collecting nearly $700 billion, the greatest single gathering of wealth ever recorded. That is not bad for a system so reviled and so subject to congressional whim. Among the forms that have come in is that of the President and his wife. The Reagans declared an income of $422,834 for last year ($200,000 of it from his presidential salary, $192,000 in interest and dividends, $26,000 from pensions, and $3,600 from rented land on their California ranch) and paid taxes of $128,639. They claimed $15,307 in deductions for charitable contributions, $5,000 of which went to his alma mater, Eureka College, with most of the rest in cash donations to unspecified beneficiaries. Although he accepts federal matching funds for his campaign, Reagan did not check off the box directing that $1 of his taxes be allocated for that purpose.

Egger fully expects a couple of his service centers--perhaps Austin or Fresno--to have billion-dollar days, another of those tax events that boggle the mind. The last time that a billion-dollar day was reported, checks, money orders and cash filled 100 boxes 3 in. by 7 1/2 in. by 30 in. and were hustled onboard airplanes and rushed to banks for tabulating.

And Egger, 63, an Indiana boy with a heart bypass, two grandchildren, and gray suits that he buys off the rack at Raleighs clothing store, will drive his four-year-old Olds to and from his Washington office, thinking happily about all those returns flooding in. Nobody has stoned him. He lives in Chevy Chase, not Vaux-le-Vicomte. His reward may be a day off to sail his battered 24-ft. Columbia sailboat on Chesapeake Bay, something he loves almost as much as an honest and ontime 1040.