About the IRS

Part I — The real history

The origins: funding a nation at war

The history of the American tax administration begins in the middle of the Civil War. In 1862, to fund the Union's war effort, President Abraham Lincoln signed a revenue act that created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and introduced an income tax. This was the birth of what would become the IRS.

The tax was repealed about ten years later, once the war was over. For decades, the federal government then lived mainly on customs duties and taxes on certain goods, such as alcohol and tobacco.

A new attempt at an income tax was made in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional the very next year. It would take a constitutional amendment to settle the question for good.

Key dates

From the war tax of 1862 to the modern administration, the IRS was built step by step, shaped by crises, reforms and major constitutional debates. In 1913, the very first federal income tax return was only a few pages long: it was the ancestor of the famous Form 1040.

1. 1862

   The office of Commissioner is created

   The Revenue Act of 1862 created the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and a first income tax, intended to fund the war.

2. 1872

   The war tax is repealed

   With peace restored, the income tax was repealed. The service kept collecting taxes on alcohol and tobacco.

3. 1913

   The 16th Amendment

   The Constitution now allowed Congress to levy an income tax. The modern federal income tax was born.

4. 1943

   Withholding at source

   During the Second World War, tax began to be withheld directly from wages, a system still in place today.

5. 1953

   The name “IRS” is born

   After a major reorganization, the Bureau of Internal Revenue took the name Internal Revenue Service, to emphasize its mission of service.

6. 1998

   Reform and taxpayer rights

   A major reform act modernized the organization and strengthened taxpayers' rights in their dealings with the administration.

Today, the IRS is part of the Department of the Treasury. Every year it processes hundreds of millions of returns and collects most federal revenue.

The seal

Part II — The role-play universe

The IRS in San Andreas

This part is fiction: it tells the story of the IRS in the role-play universe of irs-rp.com.

For a long time, the State of San Andreas lived with a fragmented tax system. Each county collected taxes its own way, records got lost between Los Santos and Blaine County, and an underground economy thrived in the shadow of big business.

Faced with this situation, the Government of San Andreas decided to entrust the collection and auditing of taxes to a single administration, modeled on the federal IRS. This is how the State of San Andreas Administration was born, bearing the name and seal of the Internal Revenue Service.

1. Step 1

   The findings

   Insufficient revenue, fraud that was hard to track, businesses without clear obligations: the State launched a review of its tax system.

2. Step 2

   The founding agreement

   The Government of San Andreas created the State tax administration and gave it three missions: collect, audit and support.

3. Step 3

   The Los Santos headquarters

   The first office opened in Los Santos, at the heart of the State's economic life. The first agents were recruited and trained there.

4. Step 4

   Blaine County

   Local offices opened in Sandy Shores and Paleto Bay, so that residents of the northern State no longer had to cross the whole territory.

5. Today

   The online portal

   With irs-rp.com, businesses file their returns online, and payments and case tracking are handled from the portal.

Our offices

Our missions

Collect

Collect tax from San Andreas businesses, based on their returns, fairly and transparently.

Audit

Check returns and fight fraud and money laundering, together with the State authorities.

Support

Inform taxpayers, help them with their procedures and answer their questions.