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C00002 00002	March 19, 1980, Wall Street Journal
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March 19, 1980, Wall Street Journal

File 'em under "L" for "lost".  The IRS couldn't do much else.

	Banks and companies use forms 1099 and 1087 to report taxpayers'
nonwage income, such as dividends and interest.  The IRS gets millions
of them to check against returns.  But when it investigated Perry
and Vicki Levey and Myron and Heidi Levey of New Jersey, it sent
summonses to banks for duplicate copies.  The families objected.
A federal judge agreed the IRS must use the copies already in its
posession, not the banks', so the IRS appealed.

	"Incredibly" the third circuit U.S. appeals court found, the
IRS uses the forms in random checks, then stores them "without
any indexing system or method of retrieval" - due to costs.
It discards them in about five years, so the Levey forms at issue
were probably gone.  "As a practical matter," the appeals court
said, the IRS wasn't in posession of the Levey forms, and its
summonses to the banks weren't the "harassment" pleaded by the Levey's.

	The appeals court reversed the lower court and said the banks
must provide the copies the IRS wanted.