By Udo Klabunde
Philadelphia, PA – When 43-year-old IRS agent Harold Dredocker woke late Sunday morning he had a thumping headache, a ringing in his ears, and the terrible feeling that he drunk audited somebody last night. He stumbled into the bathroom to find vomit spatter in his shower and hundreds of random receipts for everything from hospital payments to Goodwill drop-offs.
“I scanned through some of the receipts looking for anything that might give me a clue about who I might have audited while in a drunken stupor, but nothing jumped out at me,” he said.
Dredocker washed down a pair of ibuprofens with some coffee after chugging a pint of water and tried to clear his head. The previous night, his college friend Jeannie’s wedding reception featured an open bar and he vaguely recollected doing Jager bombs with a couple of his frat brothers Wes and T-Bone.
“Ugh! Why do I do that to myself? I’m not a kid anymore. At least I didn’t pass out and have someone draw a penis spewing amortization tables on my face with a Sharpie. Accounting Fraternities are so hard core.”
Dredocker then went into his living room where several manilla envelopes had been upended and their contents scattered about the floor among empty cans of White Claw. He knelt down and began organizing meticulous piles.
“Here we go. The usual suspects,” he said, pointing to recent tax returns for each of his two ex-wives, three ex-girlfriends, and his estranged brother.
41-year-old Tracey Ring married Dredocker right after college. After nine years and two daughters they split up.
“This kind of thing happens every couple years,” she said when interviewed about Dredocker’s drunken auditing. “He’ll get bombed and call me crying, telling me how much he still loves me, and how I should have waited another couple of weeks to sell a stock so that it would be taxed as long-term capital gains instead of ordinary income.”
Dredocker acknowledges the need to move on, “The rule of thumb is to get rid of tax returns older than three years, and that’s what I tell everyone. But it’s harder to walk the walk than talk the talk.”
Most recent girlfriend Monica Prebski was warned by her friends when she first started dating Dredocker. “Everybody was like, ‘He’s a CPA, you know how emotional they are.’ He hasn’t drunk audited me yet as far as I know, but I know it might happen. I told him when we broke up that if he ever needed to get together and look through some old returns for skipped deductions, I was willing to do that, but he never did. Whatever.”
“The key to doing this,” Dredocker said as he slowly reassembled the files, “is to not look at my post-it notes. If I wrote something down, it’s going to be because I saw something egregious and I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole for the next three hours.”
At a quarter past ten, Dredocker was moderately satisfied that the returns were properly reassembled and ready to be smuggled back into the IRS archives. He acknowledged that it’s against regulation to take the files home but said that supervisors tended to look the other way, recognizing that the practice was too widespread to stop.
“I’m pretty sure that I drunk audited my brother last night. We haven’t spoken since I called him after a July 4th party where I was doing keg stands. I said some pretty nasty things about all the money he was wasting by not forming an LLC for his model railroading side business, and now I can never take that back.”