Internal Revenue Service

The Internal Revenue Service was a recurring source of scrutiny and anxiety in Andy Warhol’s business life, shaping the unusually exact record of his daily expenses. Its presence in the diary ranges from years of audits that Warhol believed had political origins to a tense January 1980 visit in which agents demanded records and his lawyer advised him not to speak with them.

Audits and the Daily Record

The agency’s scrutiny was not a one-time episode. The diary’s editor, Pat Hackett, says the Internal Revenue Service subjected Warhol’s business to its first major audit in 1972 and continued examining it every year until his death. Warhol believed the audits had been prompted by someone in the Nixon administration because his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern depicted Richard M. Nixon with a green face and urged viewers to vote for McGovern. The account distinguishes that conviction from an established explanation for the audits.

Tax accountability entered the routine of the diary itself. Beginning in the fall of 1976, Hackett spoke with Warhol by telephone on weekday mornings so she could record what he had done and where he had gone the previous day, along with his business expenses. The purpose was also to satisfy tax auditors: the record included even ten-cent calls from street payphones. What became a daily narrative therefore doubled as an itemized account, connecting ordinary movements and small payments to the continuing possibility of examination.

How the Expenses Were Documented

The calls were conversations, not simply dictation. Hackett generally called around nine in the morning; Warhol recounted the previous day and night and reported cash expenses, while she made notes on a legal pad and typed the account immediately afterward. Although he called it her five-minutes-a-day job, the sessions often lasted one or two hours. Every other week or so, she brought the typed pages to the office and stapled on the cab and restaurant receipts that matched the amounts he had already reported.

The system continued when either of them traveled. Warhol might call from elsewhere, read handwritten notes on hotel stationery after returning, or give Hackett a cassette he had recorded. If Hackett was away, she sometimes called and had him read his notes to her. Weekends were gathered into a Monday session covering Friday through Sunday; no day was left out of the diary. Later additions and corrections could also arrive in calls outside the regular morning session, joining the intimate, changing account to the expense record.

The January 1980 Office Visit

On January 14, 1980, two Internal Revenue Service agents arrived at Warhol’s office. Warhol described them as shouting and demanding to see him, and he hid in Fred Hughes’s office area. One agent, whom Warhol characterized as tall, was rude; the shorter agent complimented his paintings and tried to draw him into conversation. Warhol and his colleagues called their lawyer, Bob Montgomery, who told him not to speak with the agents.

The agents eventually said they were looking for Rupert Smith. Fred Hughes continued to advise Warhol against talking to them. They left after giving him a summons, saying they wanted records, such as cancelled checks. The visit interrupted an ordinary working day that had included a medical appointment and a meeting about a commissioned portrait of a wine bottle; Montgomery cancelled and rescheduled his planned five o’clock meeting. In the diary, the encounter makes the routine paperwork’s stakes suddenly visible: records accumulated for audit were also the object of an unexpected demand at the office.

Records, Editing, and What the Diary Preserves

The diary’s accounts were organized around receipts, cash amounts, and daily entries, but the published book is not the complete archive. Hackett says the original diary ran to 20,000 pages and that she cut whole days, sometimes entire weeks, and often portions of days to produce a single volume. She also reduced lists of names and kept editorial explanations to a minimum, aiming to preserve the flow of Warhol’s voice and the reader’s sense of listening in on the morning calls.

That editorial account clarifies both the force and the limits of the evidence about the Internal Revenue Service. The published diary shows how tax scrutiny entered Warhol’s habits of accounting and how an office visit could turn that background pressure into a direct encounter. At the same time, the text is a selected record, made from telephone narration, notes, receipts, and later editing—not an unabridged file of every business transaction or audit.