Pittsburgh is not a city of procrastinators.

That may come as news to those of you who spent the weekend doing your taxes. Or to those who considered us a little late to the table building a retro baseball park, developing Downtown condominiums, obtaining a Nordstrom, and helping unelect Rick Santorum. But most of us handle our annual IRS torture test in timely fashion.

Intuit, a company behind TurboTax, produces an annual list of Top Tax Procrastinating Cities in America, based on how many of their residents wait to file tax returns in the final days before deadline. The highest percentage of procrastinators, judging from mid-April 2007 tax filings, lived in Chicago, New York, Houston, Austin, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Antonio and ... aw, we can finish this list later.

Sorry. Took a break to watch some television, graze on the sports agate page, rearrange the CDs in alphabetical order -- until getting flummoxed by where to put that "10cc's Greatest Hit" disc, which I'll get back to another day.

The research team here stumbled upon a new word for procrastination, which must have struck someone as taking too looooong to type or say. So someone came up with "faffing," which to us sounded like another quaint British expression for a sexual act that shouldn't be mentioned in a family newspaper. But at www.lifehack.org, it's defined as: "The art of doing something without achieving anything."

"Faffing affects all of us. ... It affects business, personal life, writing, Internet surfing, and domestic life," says the lifehack writer, a man who mostly advises people on how to become more productive. To avoid faffing, he suggests that people keep focused on the outcome of their task; turn off anything that may be a distraction; allow sufficient time to finish a job; let others know the deadline you're under; and allow time afterward for a quick reward.

"This is usually in the form of a quick cup of tea and a read of a book," he says of the reward. Oh, yeah, that's got to be a Brit -- no self-respecting American male would admit to salivating over either of those.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Internal Revenue Service was cracking down on those who deliberately fail to pay federal income taxes, which is a part that actor Wesley Snipes recently played. Government agencies pledged to work more closely with the IRS to detect and prosecute such wrongdoing.

"The explosion of the Internet in the last decade has greatly facilitated tax-defier activity and turned what was once a paper-based local or regional enterprise into a click-and-download national operation," said Nathan J. Hochman, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's tax division.

The IRS says a $290 billion "tax gap" exists, as the difference between what the IRS collects annually and what it believes Americans should be paying. The agency says about 85 percent of taxes are paid voluntarily and it has a goal of getting that up to 90 percent over the next decade.

This Morning File column as originally published April 14, 2008 underestimated the amount that Americans making $1 million or more a year would have to contribute to make up the nation's $290 billion under-payment of income taxes. They would each have to contribute $1 million.