The ongoing IRS audit of Warhol’s business

The ongoing IRS audit of Warhol’s business made bookkeeping part of Andy Warhol’s daily life and helped give the diary its practical purpose. What began as a way to track visitors, events, and expenses became a first-person account assembled through regular calls with Pat Hackett—one that could examine ordinary life while also preserving details for tax scrutiny.

A Record Born of Scrutiny

Before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log: she listed business visitors and notable events from the previous night, sometimes asking several people for their versions, and recorded what Warhol had spent. The method was designed to establish what had happened and what it had cost, not to capture Warhol’s personal perspective. When Hackett said she no longer wanted to work at the office, but would continue writing Popism with him, Warhol asked her to keep the log and itemize his personal expenses. She objected to calling office staff each day to reconstruct events. They agreed instead that Warhol would provide the daily account himself, turning the log into his own narrative.

That arrangement began amid unusually persistent tax pressure. The IRS had subjected Warhol’s business to its first major audit in 1972 and continued examining it every year until his death. He believed the scrutiny had been prompted by a Nixon administration response to his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern, which depicted Richard M. Nixon with a green face and carried the slogan Vote McGovern. Warhol described himself philosophically as a liberal Democrat, though he said he did not vote because he did not want to be called for jury duty. He did offer employees Election Days off if they promised to vote Democratic. The diary records his suspicion as his own conviction, not as an established explanation for the audits.

Daily Accounting by Phone

In the fall of 1976, Warhol and Hackett established weekday morning calls, usually beginning around 9 A.M. and never later than 9:30. Their ostensible task was to record everything he had done and everywhere he had gone the day and night before, along with the cash expenses incurred along the way. The smallness of the figures mattered: Warhol’s record included even ten-cent calls from street payphones. The calls were conversations rather than a simple recitation of totals. After chatting, he would report expenses and recount his activities; sessions that he called Hackett’s five-minutes-a-day job could last one or two hours.

The accounting continued onto paper through a repeated clerical routine. Hackett took extensive notes on a legal pad, then typed the entry immediately after the call, while Warhol’s intonations were still fresh. Every other week or so, she brought the typed pages to the office and attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts Warhol had left for her; the receipts matched amounts already reported by phone. The completed pages went into letter boxes. In this way, spoken recollection and physical evidence—amounts, receipts, and typed entries—were joined in a continuing record.

The schedule accommodated weekends and travel without leaving days unrecorded. The diary itself was made Monday through Friday, not on weekends; on Monday, Warhol recounted the previous Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a triple session. When he was away, he might call from his destination or write notes, usually on hotel stationery, and read them to Hackett after returning. Sometimes he dictated into a tape recorder and gave her the cassette. If Hackett was away, she might call him and have him read his notes. They also spoke outside the scheduled diary calls, about shared work or as friends; Warhol sometimes used those conversations to add to or correct an account and ask that the information be put in the diary.

The Audit Reaches the Office

The pressure documented over years became an immediate confrontation on January 14, 1980. Two IRS agents came to Warhol’s office and, in his account, shouted and demanded to see him. He hid in Fred Hughes’s office area. Warhol distinguished between the two men: one was tall and rude, while the shorter agent said he liked the paintings and tried to get Warhol to speak. The incident turned on more than Warhol’s own records. The agents eventually said they were after Rupert Smith, but Warhol was still given a summons; the records they wanted included cancelled checks. The encounter shows the audit intruding directly into the office, where an effort to avoid speaking to investigators ended with a formal demand for documents.

The diary’s exact accounting and the threatening office visit belong to the same system, but they are not the same kind of evidence. The calls made routine expenses legible; the summons made clear that government scrutiny could reach beyond those routine entries and call for business records. Warhol’s practice therefore combined ordinary self-accounting with a persistent awareness that those records might be examined.

The Published Diary and Its Limits

The published diary is not the complete ledger of that process. Hackett says the original ran to 20,000 pages and that she reduced it to one volume by cutting whole days, sometimes entire weeks, and often parts of days. She also removed many names to give the text narrative flow rather than the feel of a social column. Those editorial choices matter particularly for a record built around who was present, what happened, and what Warhol spent: the published account preserves selected evidence, not every entry or transaction.

Hackett also removed much of the interpersonal dimension of their exchanges, including references meaningful only to her, and translated the few retained personal references into third-person references using her initials. The result keeps the morning call’s intimate, conversational character while changing how the reader encounters its participants. The audit gives the diary one of its narrow practical aims, but the phone conversations exceed that aim: they became a way for Warhol to examine daily life. Its unusual force comes from holding those purposes together—personal narrative on one side, minute expense accounting under continuing scrutiny on the other.