David Burnham

Author David Burnham called the Internal Revenue Service "the single, most powerful instrument of social control in the United States." He examined the organization in his book A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS. Burnham, a former journalist of the New York Times, compared the IRS to the ... (more)New York Police Department, which he covered in the 1960s and 1970s. He compared the authority vested in a police officer to the authority of IRS agents. He stated that any organization with such authority delegated at low levels is subject to abuses and a prime candidate for poor management. A four-year project, Burnham's work was highly researched and documented. It covered the history of IRS from the Civil War era to the present.