My experience with the IRS was the same. On one hand the slowness with which they operate is ridiculous (does it really take a year and a half to tell you that some documentation in your return doesn't match up? and a couple months for every subsequent response?). On the other - once they got all the required documentation they were fair, acknowledged their mistakes, and adjusted the bill accordingly (canceled, really, since once everything was refigured the total was negligible). They're a bureaucracy, but they're not really an evil bureaucracy.