Plot

An uptight IRS agent is ordered to investigate a rural family in debt to the government...but the family - including lovely daughter Mariette - help him loosen up.

Tax collector Lorenzo Charlton comes to the Larkins' farm to ask why Pop Larkins hasn't paid his back taxes. Charlton has to stay for a day to try to estimate the income from the farm, but it isn't easy to calculate when the farmer has such a lovely daughter, Mariette...—Mattias Thuresson

The Larkins are a family of farmers. One of their neighbors who thinks they're disgusting tries to get rid of them by asking a friend of his at the IRS to audit them. So an uptight IRS agent Lorenzo Chandler is sent to assess what they owe. The Larkins welcome him and pamper him and get him to loosen up, he also finds himself attracted to their daughter Mariette.—rcs0411@yahoo.com

Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Larkin - Pop and Ma - operate a farm in rural Maryland with their five children, the farm passed down through generations of Pop's family. They are more than content with their life. Pop largely operates on the barter system, as he believes these goods and services are truly the measures of worth to people, while money just gets in the way. He has inbred this sensibility into his family, all the children who happily do their part around the farm, and have skills of their own which assist in running the farm or which they can barter for what they need. They are generally well loved within the community - Pop gladly donating his time and goods to community causes - except by their controlling next door neighbor, the wealthy Wendell Burnshaw, who, if he had his way, would buy out the Larkins to force them to move. The last straw for Burnshaw is when Pop, without asking, "borrows" Burnshaw's prized boar as stud for his own sow, the barter, in Pop's mind, to be Burnshaw having first pick of the litter. Burnshaw, believing that Pop is a cheat who always seems to have all the money he needs, probably cheats on his income taxes as well, and as such, decides to use one of his tax lawyer's contacts at Internal Revenue, cutthroat Oliver Kelsey, to investigate the Larkins. Kelsey finds that Pop has never filed an income tax return and thus has never paid income tax. As such, Kelsey gets his chief investigator Lorenzo Charlton to conduct an audit on the Larkins. Lorenzo is officious and ambitious, he having aspirations to be a lawyer and congressman. Having nothing to hide, Pop welcomes who the family coins" Charlie" into their home, for him to do whatever he needs. Complications ensue when Charlie finds that the case is more difficult than it first appears, as the continual bartering does not have a paper trail or has such a long lineage, it difficult to find the beginning. Further complications ensue when Pop and Ma believe that Charlie is just the type of man that their eldest daughter, the spunky and pretty Mariette Larkin, should marry, rather than the many farm boys with who she has generally just roughhoused up to this point, but who are obviously attracted to her as a boy is to a girl. Mariette is attracted to Charlie, if he would just loosen up a little. The audit may become a sticking point between the two in ever getting together, Charlie who knows that the Larkins should owe something but how much within the context is a good question, especially as he too is gaining an affinity for the family and for Mariette. Burnshaw, Kelsey and Kelsey's superiors may have some say in the matter.—Huggo