>...That's right, not a single one of the stories about >how IRS was abusing taxpayers turned out to be true! (And do you >recall hearing that on the nightly news?) > > >I am hard pressed to believe that a person's [SS] benefits would be severed on the basis of a piece of mail with "deceased" being written on it. ... > > >...I am astonished to learn that we have government employees >so dense that when a person presents himself with proper >identification that this employee wouldn't accept the fact that he >is alive. > >"Richard A. Pence" <richardpence@pipeline.com> You are so fortunate, Richard, if you've never encountered any of the problems with government similar to the tales heard. Based on the experience you've demonstrated on this and other lists, I wouldn't expect that you unconditionally believe everything you see and hear about your ancestors when researching your family history, or that you believe everything you see in print or everything you hear on tv or the internet. I'm afraid to believe that the IRS or SSA doesn't make such errors and hasn't abused some citizens is just as naïve, if not more so. It's really hard to believe that we wouldn't have heard *somewhere* on the news that none of the IRS taxpayer abuse stories were true, as much as we heard about those problems. That should have been major news if that was indeed the commission's finding; though it's not surprising that a government commission might reach that finding (legit or not), since the government is so adept at developing employees to "cover their six." Most citizens who once blindly trusted and believed in their government never thought to keep records any longer than what the IRS said they neeeded, nor do they have the funds to afford adequate legal help to fight the IRS, not to mention that they are so traumatized when this happens that they just give up trying. I do know this for fact because my family has lived through such a fight when we were in the right, and we have come to know a few other families who had such legitimate problems. There's no point in going through all the horrid details here. Suffice it to say that it, too, all started simply because first some clerk somewhere at the IRS accidentally hit a delete button when they were switching over to computers and canceled out half our records, and then another clerk wasn't paying attention to address changes on our returns over the subsequent years. Had I taken that advice they give to keep copies of ordinary tax returns for only three years, we would have had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and interest more than 10 years after the taxes had been filed! (IRS claimed they'd been sending notices to us for many years, but they were sending them to the address where we'd lived when we filed our taxes more than 10 years earlier...despite our having filed a return every year and received refunds at 4 newer addresses in that time! Funny thing, though, they had my husband's current employer's address when they tried to attach his salary...meaning they got their copies of the W-2s with our latest home address there too!) You can definitely believe such horror stories have happened to some people, with the IRS and the SSA. Keep in mind that the majority of government workers are just ordinary people, including a very broad range of capabilities, intelligence, integrity, and pride in work product, as well as the same naïveté as the citizens outside government. All it takes is just one person not doing his/her job well (perhaps through carelessness or maybe just a typo, or perhaps with good intentions thinking "Why would anyone send a SS check back with 'deceased' written on the envelope unless it were true")... and they could easily set a major nightmare in motion. Of course, SSA makes it extra easy for your records to get messed up by encouraging strangers with SS check envelopes bearing in the largest, boldest print on it "_*RECIPIENT DECEASED*_ *Check here and drop in mailbox*." The number of ways errors could occur in just these two agencies is staggering. Then, if you throw into the government work population the same percentage of crooks and malcontents found in the general population (many would say it's more), and you add the difficulty civil service regs have established in getting rid of the incompetents once there, you have great potential for many, many more problems. Certainly these days, the same principles that apply to our genealogy research also apply to dealing with the government or any other organization. The key in all instances is to take everything with that proverbial "grain of salt," gather all the information available, objectively analyze that info before drawing conclusions, and keep all your evidence in case you need it for verification in the future.. Diane genmail@1st.net