What Happened When 20 Feet of Water Flooded the I.R.S. Building?

Amazing if true:

In , the subbasement and basement of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) National Headquarters building in Washington, D.C., were flooded with over 20 feet of water. The IRS responded by implementing business resumption plans that contain specific procedures for managing such events. While the flood displaced over 2,200 IRS personnel who worked in the building, TIGTA found no measurable impact on taxpayers and tax administration.

This is a little discouraging to anyone who daydreams of a frontal assault on the nation’s tax-collecting bureaucracy. Apparently they’re pretty resilient.

On the other hand, maybe TIGTA was just measuring the wrong thing:

[W]e found no measurable impact on taxpayers and tax administration. We attribute this to the nature of the work performed at this building and the contingency plans the IRS had in place and implemented to manage the crisis. The IRS personnel who work in the Headquarters building are involved with strategy, program planning and monitoring, and other activities that do not require a significant amount of day-to-day contact with taxpayers.

In , before such views became trendy nationwide, San Francisco voters approved a “nonbinding resolution” of their own — Proposition N — answering “yes!” by about a two-to-one margin to the question:

Shall it be City policy to urge the United States government to withdraw all troops from Iraq and bring all military personnel in Iraq back to the United States?

Also in , the average San Francisco tax return showed a $12,180 federal income tax liability, putting our county in the top 0.8% of income-tax-paying counties nationwide (the average return in the average county in America showed $3,139 in federal income tax in ).

This, according to figures released by the Tax Foundation showing federal income tax burden by county, by congressional district, and by “major city area.”