Unbridled Power: Inside the Secret Culture of the IRS

In 1988, with nine years of similar experience at the Defense Department, Davis was hired as the first (and, as it turns out, last) historian for the Internal Revenue Service. As she soon learned, there was a catch to her new position: once a case is closed, IRS policy demands that files associated with it be discarded. In fact, IRS records in the National Archives end in 1917. By going public with allegations that top IRS officials broke laws and that the agency shredded its internal records to avoid public accountability, Davis ran afoul of her supervisors and became the target of what she calls a retaliatory internal security investigation. After seven years of frustration, she quit her job under pressure in 1995. In an engrossing, sometimes overly chatty account, Davis interweaves her own experiences with press accounts and transcripts of congressional hearings on the IRS, discussing IRS audits of Nixon's political enemies, the agency's arbitrary raids of businesses, its silencing of whistle-blowers, its punitive audits of radical groups and activist individuals, its inefficient and costly upgrade of its computers. Her colorful sketch of the Internal Revenue Service from the Civil War to the present revealingly links changes and loopholes in the tax code to historical events. (Mar.)