Discredited

TAXATION is culture, and in the fall of 1997, eager to observe that culture at first hand, I signed up for a crash course in tax preparation at my local H & R Block in Brooklyn. As I made my way to the dusty storefront, I wondered if I had chosen too locally. Brooklyn today is on the upswing, but it is still a modest borough, and this was a modest corner of it. Block customers in this office are apt to be court stenographers and policemen. How complicated could their taxes be? Surely their returns were a straightforward matter of withhold-and-refund. Perhaps I should have signed up at H & R Block’s Wall Street office, a place that would feature the complex code in full flower, complete with the exotic write-offs that were once the subject of New Yorker cartoons.

I needn’t have worried. Even in the off season, the Brooklyn office gave off the unmistakable hum of commerce. The place was filled with customers. Taxes were clearly an intricate and earnest business in this part of the world, a fact that my also-earnest teacher confirmed at one of our first classes. Taxes were complicated, she told us—“I won’t even tie up your brains with how complicated.” But she made one thing clear: The device to be understood was the tax credit. For any taxpayer who could claim credits, particularly a species known as the Earned Income Credit, “there is money to be made”—often thousands of dollars. In a poster that hung on the wall, my teacher’s employer made a similar assertion: Under the image of a young man standing beside a car—presumably purchased with money generated by a tax credit—were the words, “Thanks, H & R Block.”