"Everyone has an obligation to pay their taxes," he said. "But they're entitled to due process and its important that they be treated fairly."

Delaware's senior senator took on the Internal Revenue Service, conducting Senate Finance Committee hearings in 1998 on abuses in tax law enforcement. He followed that up last spring with publication of a book – his first – which is a sort of primer on what can happen when the enforcers run amok.

The book's title, 'The Power to Destroy', appropriately sums that up.

Co-authored – but not ghostwritten, Roth insisted in an interview with Delaforum – with aide William Nixon, the book is anything but an academic kid-gloves treatment of the topic. It comes off as a sort of combination of vintage Ralph Nader and Sixty Minutes. As they say, it names names and rattles chains.

Roth said he wrote the book in part because of a desire to get across the message that I.R.S. abuse targets "the little guy." Rich folk and the corporations have their high-ticket tax lawyers. Proverbial John Q. is pretty much left to his own devices. Stopping short of saying it in so many words, he indicated that it does not hurt for the ordinary citizen to have an influential ally and that there is more than a little satisfaction in being able to fill that role.

at a list price of $23. 

Roth said he is pleased with the early record of I.R.S. Commissioner Charles Rossotti, who pledged reform when he was appointed after the abuses hearings. Roth called Rossotti "an outstanding man," but added that he has little hope the agency will fully mend its ways any time soon.

"It could take 10 years before you make all the changes. But progress is being made," the senator said. He indicated that he intends to monitor that as the process goes forward.

Even before the widely reported 1998 hearings, Roth enjoyed a national reputation in field of financial legislation – especially as it relates to individuals. He was co-sponsor of the Kemp-Roth tax cut during the Reagan years, early proponent of the individual retirement account, and, of course, architect of the Roth I.R.A.

Interestingly enough, his career followed somewhat in the footsteps of the late John Williams, the Delaware senator who made his national reputation uncovering scandal in the tax collecting system back in the 1950s. That all started, Williams much later revealed, when a Sussex County neighbor came to him for help with what he considered an unfair tax audit.

Roth said he does not hold out much hope for any true reform of federal tax law. "Every time we talk about tax reform and go to pass a new bill we make compromise and then we go to conference with the House [of Representatives] and compromise some more," he said.

The result is that the tax code remains as voluminous as before and full of so called loopholes and questionable incentives.