Brilliantly hilarious post from Lowering the Bar. You’ll want to read the entire thing because it’s packed with laughs. It begins:
Okay, “strategy” is not the right word, because far be it from me to suggest that anyone would do this deliberately. But if one were to accidentally trip on a phone cord while visiting the IRS to discuss a large unpaid tax bill, an even larger personal-injury award might just turn that frown upside down.
Such was the bad and/or good fortune of William Berroyer, Sr., who walked into an IRS office to discuss a $60,000 tax debt and walked out with an injury that led to an $862,000 judgment.
I find I can’t stop copying and pasting parts of this laughter-imbued story:
The judge ultimately found that the IRS had been negligent and that Berroyer had suffered a “mild spinal-cord injury,” which is not surprising because of the expert’s concession. But he didn’t buy the claim that Berroyer was wheelchair-bound (partly because video showed he wasn’t). Nor did he find Berroyer’s medical witnesses very credible, noting that he didn’t call as a witness the doctor who’s treated him for the past 25 years.
Your question at this point is probably, then how did the guy end up with $862,000, and my answer is, I do not know.
Really, really, really (although someone I know once declared that he did not like what he considered unnecessary words like “really,” and “just”, etc), you want to read the whole thing. It’ll zing up your day.
P.S. And I never liked that guy who didn’t like “really.”