#jarndyce

Gretchen Morgenson reports in the NY Times on an investigation of a small 401(k) plan that has fallen into limbo.

The employees of a bankrupt company have been kept from their money for five years while the IRS ponders over the technical question of whether or not the plan is "qualified". As it investigates the plan, the IRS continues to ask for paperwork from the trustee of the plan, who passes his fees on to the the hapless ex-employees.

In a historic though unintended literary effort, the US government has managed to conflate Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit and Bleak House into one story.

From Little Dorrit:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. . . . This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. . . .  Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

From Bleak House:

AND SHE BURNED WHATSISFACE'S FLOWERS.

THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SHOULD BE. Dickens, you suck. EDIT: Are they RECONSIDERING? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS? Dickens is messing with my head.