Our Tax Dollars 1100 BLOCK CONSTITUTION AVENUE NW
While only Congress — the people’s elected representatives — can impose taxes and decide how they are spent, the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the U.S. Treasury, ensures those taxes are collected fairly and efficiently. The IRS building reminds citizens what their tax dollars buy. In the words of the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes engraved over the building’s entrance, “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.” Revenues collected by the IRS — including income, corporate, estate, excise, gift, and employment taxes — pay for everything from national defense and highways to weather forecasts and food safety inspections. Louis A. Simon, superintendent of the architectural section of the Treasury Department, designed the IRS building to be the least ornate in the Federal Triangle because it houses a bureau, rather than a department of government. The building’s French Renaissance style is similar to its neighbors’, but its only embellishments are two eagle sculptures and four carved limestone panels flanking the entrance. Congress enacted the first income tax to finance the Civil War, and in 1862 President Abraham Lincoln appointed a commissioner of internal revenue to collect it. A decade later the income tax was repealed and not revived until 1913, when the 16th Amendment to the Constitution authorized Congress to enact a permanent income tax. The first Form 1040 was issued that year, and Americans began paying one percent tax on personal incomes greater than $3,000, and six percent on incomes greater than $500,000.
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