Informatoin Retrieval

My son noticed the billboard first. It and several of its counterparts in both English and Spanish have sprouted up in our fair city over the past few weeks. "Legal/Illegal - Your Tax Preparer Is?" Accompanying the hazy grammar is the shadowy figure right out of Terry Gilliam's worst dreams. On the California Tax Education Council's website are even more Orwellian messages: "Never Assume. Always Verify," or, "Good Friend. Bad Referral?" It all rings too closely to "Don't Suspect A Friend. Report Him."
Paranoia aside, what is tax preparation but a scam within a scam? It's supposed to be a game. We pay the government money, and then we try and get it back. It's a little like a shell game or three card monte, except the odds are worse. The really interesting part of this equation is this: It is all the legal tax preparers who advertise how much of your hard-earned cash they can retrieve from the Internal Revenue Vortex. The really good ones, the ones that work for billionaires and corporations can get money back that wasn't even paid out in the first place. This may be why the Internal Revenue Service has been steadily increasing the number of audits for the past few years, especially for those making more than a million dollars a year.
With the acknowledged lack of millionaires in our neighborhood, it did make me wonder about the need for the looming presence of the Tax Education Council. Then I made a connection to a sign I recall seeing along the roadside: "Speed Checked By Aircraft." It gave me pause on a number of occasions when I was tempted to put the pedal to the metal, though I could never once recall seeing a plane or helicopter over any of those stretches of highway. It was my older brother who pointed out that the relative expense of such an operation would be ridiculous compared to the number of citations that could be written, since the details such as license plate numbers would be hard to come by at any kind of reasonable altitude. The signs, however, could be left in place as a deterrent. It would cost more money to take them down.
On your way over to your tax preparer, don't forget to watch your speed.