WE'RE WATCHING YOU

The IRS may keep better track of you than your mother does, but when it comes to keeping tabs on itself, forget it.

Shelley Davis, who was hired in 1988 as the IRS' first official historian, is resigning because she believes the agency is shying away from cataloguing its records, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

For instance: When Davis began her job of putting files together, she found out that the IRS had not turned over "records of historical significance" to the National Archives since 1971 (as it is required to do) and that some of those records included tax assessment lists from 1909 to 1917.

What's worse: The IRS said that Davis will not be replaced after she leaves. So much for the importance of history. Anything can be rewritten, and will be, in shades of 1984.

Imagine the possibilities of evasion for the IRS bureaucrats when asked to verify facts. The tax law changes of 1986? Nope, nope, never happened. Your tax deductions because of your house and children? You never had a house and children. Watergate? We have no record of that.

Ah, Watergate. You might have known it would trace back to President Nixon somehow. After Nixon's resignation, Congress enacted more stringent taxpayer privacy laws to protect against future attempts to get confidential information on people the government didn't like.

As a result, the IRS has no history and we have no accountability.

"Hey, Harold," one can picture a grizzled IRS tax collector yelling across an office piled with grungy manila folders and days-old, stained coffee mugs. "You ever see that audit I was working on?"

"Nope, nope, never seen it. Must have been shredded last night by the clean-up crew," Harold's compatriot replies.

"Oh well," Harold says. "I guess I'll just send the person into bankruptcy. It's easier than starting all over."

Woe to you if you are caught in Harold's ahistorical grip. To bar against such frightening possibilities, the IRS should get another historian and clean up its act before it cleans up everyone else's.