Three times Hicks tried to pay her bill; each time IRS errors misrecorded her payment, resulting in renewed IRS harassment, she said, once after a five-year lapse.
Through it all, she said, the IRS pressure caused her countless sleepless nights and led her parents to cash out precious retirement funds in hope of easing her emotional strain. It ended recently only after Hicks wrote for help to Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R., Del.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
``We will suffer the effects of this IRS collection for the rest of our lives,'' a sobbing Hicks told Roth's committee yesterday as it probed IRS abuses of power as a first step toward reform.
``It's hard to understand how these occurrences do occur,'' Roth said. ``We apologize for the experiences you have been through.'' He stressed that cases such as Hicks' are not just random exceptions but result from a ``fault of the system.''
Shelley L. Davis, the IRS official historian for seven years until 1996, agreed. The IRS, she testified, is suffused with ``an arrogant and dangerous culture'' that routinely leads to ``abuse of taxpayers.''
While some Senate Democrats voiced concerns that the Republican-led committee might be ``bureaucrat-bashing'' to soften the way for later passage of a GOP flat-tax plan - and some Republican lawmakers acknowledged that as one goal - senators on both sides agreed that too often today, the IRS is simply out of control.
Hicks' IRS horror story was hardly the only one.
Tom Savage, 69, runs a small construction firm in Lewes, Del. When one of his subcontractors got into tax trouble, the IRS came after Savage. It seized a $145,000 check to his business from the state - even though there had been no finding anywhere that Savage or his business was culpable, he said.
