Wall Street Journal:

When an of­fi­cer called Mr. Haus, Mr. Haus iden­ti­fied him­self as an IRS agent but said Haus wasn’t his real name. He had used an alias. The of­fi­cer, also sus­pect­ing a scam, warned that if he re­turned to the tax­pay­er’s home he’d be ar­rested. Mr. Haus then filed a com­plaint against the Mar­ion po­lice of­fi­cer with the Trea­sury De­part­ment in­spec­tor gen­eral.

The House let­ter says the tax­payer on May 4 spoke with Mr. Haus’s su­per­vi­sor, who clar­i­fied that she owed noth­ing and said—in the un­der­state­ment of the year—that “things never should have got­ten this far.” Yet the fol­low­ing day, the tax­payer re­ceived a let­ter—ad­dressed to the dece­dent—stat­ing that the dece­dent was delin­quent on sev­eral 1040 fil­ings. This was the first and only mail notif­ication the tax­payer re­ceived. The tax­payer was again told by the su­per­vi­sor that noth­ing was owed and was no­ti­fied on May 30 that the case was closed.

If true, this is some­thing else. An agent of the Trea­sury, wield­ing the power of tax en­force­ment, shows up unan­nounced at a tax­pay­er’s home. He lies about his iden­tity and his pur­pose to get in­side, then threat­ens the tax­payer with pun­ish­ment if she doesn’t pay a tax bill that she doesn’t owe. The IRS agent leaves only af­ter an in­ter­ven­tion by her lawyer, and when lo­cal po­lice call the agent he sics the Trea­sury De­part­ment on the of­fi­cer.