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Every taxpayer will be given an identity number (85% will use their social security numbers; the others will be assigned numbers), which will have to be included with his name on not only his income tax return and withholding statements but on any bank, corporation or other business report of dividends, interest, rent or royalties. At IRS regional centers, information from the returns will be transcribed on punch cards and then on magnetic tape before being shipped to Martinsburg. Eventually, Martinsburg will contain a master file on 80 million individual and corporate taxpayers that will stretch for 400 miles on magnetic tape, yet be stored in a single room measuring only about 30 ft. by 40 ft.
When the computer system, which will cost the Government $7,000,000 a year to rent, is fed a taxpayer's return, it will match informational documents and past returns in its memory with the new tax report. For the first time, all withholding statements will be checked against returns, and the machine will immediately indicate what citizens have not filed returns. The computers will rapidly disclose who owes taxes for previous years, who has refunds coming and who filed duplicate claims for refunds. "We can program this thing," says Clinton Walsh, chief of the IRS's management branch, "to do just about anything we want it to do." The computer system has already been pressed into service to process business tax returns from the seven Southern states, even writes businessmen robot letters if they pay too much or too little. But the taxpayer has a period of grace before the impersonal and sleepless computers go to work on the entire country in 1966—and the IRS is using the interim to 156.8 psychological advantage. "As a word to the wise," says Commissioner Caplin, "I would say that this is a very good time to clean the slate if past errors or omissions are known. In fact, if I had a friend with doubts about his personal tax records. I would advise him to drop around to his district office soon and clear them up." Your friendly neighborhood tax collector thinks the odds are about to make the struggle completely one-sided.