News

Return To Sender

A seasonal tax worker has an irritating summer.

By Mark Kind 

Each spring, Kansas City tax returns pile up in the mailbox that Jerald B. Wolfson rents at the post office in the federal building downtown. The preprinted envelopes mention the "City of Kansas City, Missouri, Revenue Division," but the box number is Wolfson's. As would any sensible Kansas Citian old enough to remember Tom Pendergast, Wolfson concludes that he's either stumbled across some kind of tax embezzlement scheme or he's made an enemy in city government.

"Somebody at City Hall wants to harass me, and the way they're harassing me is sending me tax returns," he says. "I got over a hundred of them."

Of course, he can't be sure they're tax returns because he's never opened one. But presumably he knows a tax return when he sees its envelope: He works as a seasonal employee at the Internal Revenue Service Center on Bannister Road.

Rather than throw the envelopes away, he has turned them over to the friendly postal workers at the federal building, or he's walked across 12th Street to City Hall, past Abraham and Tad Lincoln, and delivered them to the Revenue Division in person.

He has also complained. After getting no satisfaction from Mayor Kay Barnes, Wolfson wrote to Jackson County Prosecutor Robert Beaird, requesting legal action. "For reasons known only to themselves, the employees of the city use my post office box as a mode of receiving city tax returns," he told Beaird. "I have written the mayor and several other persons about this matter for two years."

Eric Davison, the Revenue Division's manager of document processing, says some private tax-preparation company must have printed up the erroneous envelopes; Wolfson's box number is just one digit different from the box where the city collects its reviled 1 percent earnings taxes. Davison says he'll work with Wolfson to figure out which tax-preparation company can't keep its numbers straight.

"We certainly don't want our tax returns going to the wrong address," he says.

With Wolfson's problem solved, maybe Davison can collect enough extra money to pay those KCMO lifeguards who had to go on strike last week because the city couldn't figure out how to add up their paychecks.