Help for the Hopeless

The groaning taxpayer studiously applied his nose to the grindstone. Now he knew what he was up against.

Self-styled taxperts all over the land gave furiously contradictory answers to reporters who brought them identical sets of figures. Virginia's hopeful Representative A. Willis Robertson, who had proposed that the Bureau of Internal Revenue do all the little taxpayer's figuring for him, had given up hope. The average taxpayer must muddle through on his own.

If his loneliness with Form 1040 got too horrible, he could still get help, of a kind. Vacant holes-in-the-wall from coast to coast suddenly became taxperts' offices. At one level above that, the nation blossomed with little schools for the tutoring of tax tutors. Biggest boom in this field of adult education came in the great industrial centers, where war plants sent their junior executives to income-tax classes, hoping to cut down absenteeism caused by tax-wrestlers. The junior executives then returned to the plants and set up as short-order advisers to the ignorant or confused. Such classes attracted more than 3,000 students in Cleveland.

In California, the tax students were high-school teachers. The California scheme: the teachers will teach the new subject to their regular high-school students, who will then go home and be father's little helpers. In Detroit, tax officials estimated that the hole-in-the-wall advisers, with their eyes open or shut, got the right answers about 10% of the time. In Portland, Ore., ambulances responded twice to calls from collectors' offices. A woman confronted with her final figure was "in a state of collapse"; a strong man who had spied his had fainted. And Oregon's Collector of Internal Revenue J. W. Maloney announced that he was unable to figure out his own tax.

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