(FORTUNE Magazine) – When Zoe Baird got shot down for malefactions relating to domestic help, it suddenly occurred to your servant that he himself was now a logical candidate for the job of U.S. Attorney General. Well, almost logical. Admittedly weighing against him in the A.G. competition were his allergic reaction to the 1992 Democratic platform and his extreme reluctance to undergo a sex-change operation. On the other hand, he had one quite rare and suddenly significant qualification: a record of gamely if not insanely endeavoring to cope with the blizzard of regulatory paperwork associated with the employment of domestic servants in the U.S.A. In one respect, the news accounts about Zoe seemed curiously incomplete. The papers kept stating that she had failed to pay Social Security taxes on her Peruvian helpers. Unmentioned were her posture toward numerous other transactions all too familiar around our house. Following is what gives with a New York-based employer who has a federal employer ID number with just as many digits (nine) as Exxon's even though his entire work force is a cleaning lady who comes in for about six hours twice a week. We begin with Treasury Form 942, whereon you report total wages paid to household employees, along with Social Security and Medicare taxes paid and federal income tax withheld. Form 942 must be dealt with quarterly, and in the final quarter it comes with papers enabling you to create six copies of W-2 forms. An infuriating detail about the W-2 exercise is that it requires five sheets of carbon paper, and since just about no other transaction in the modern era calls for carbons, we always end up buying a sheaf of the stuff in January and then rapidly losing it after the forms are created. Anyhow, one of the six W-2 copies is for the employer's own records, three are for the employee, one is sent to the Social Security Administration, and one gets forwarded to New York State along with certain NYS forms. Possibly you wish to know which state forms. Your servant is not entirely sure. Dismaying vast segments of the Empire State's haute bourgeoisie, New York recently ''simplified'' its withholding and wage-reporting system, introducing new rules and new forms. The state sent us 14 copies of a new WT-1 (Return of Tax Withheld), which we ignored on the ground that we were not required to withhold any tax. This resulted in our receiving an accusatory letter stating that we had failed to file ''Form WT-4A or WT-4AEZ and/or WT-4B.'' Extensive analysis of the accompanying literature leaves us still unclear which forms we should be filing. All too transparent, however, is the new requirement that our lady's income must be reported to the state even if nothing at all is withheld. Also rated strong entries in the paperwork sweepstakes are the state and federal unemployment-insurance payments, both required to be made quarterly on forms manifestly designed for large corporations. The state assigns an eight- digit reporting number to the cleaning lady's employer, requires him to count up the number of employees he had at work in the final week of the quarter, and asks for the title of the individual signing the return. Judging that humor has no place on a tax return, we long ago switched from Il Duce to N.A. The amounts involved are trivial -- the New York State Department of Labor now charges us 1.1% of the quarterly payroll, the feds 0.8% -- but just to keep a fellow on his toes, the percentages change from time to time. Some people obviously benefit from all this paperwork. The big winners would include characters committed to careers in government regulation and investors in carbon-paper companies. The losers obviously include overburdened folks like the present scrivener, but the real victims reside in the low-skill hard- work world of domestic help. Economic theory tells us that when the cost of services rises, consumption of the services must decline. The paperwork hassle plainly reduces the propensity of employers to hire household help. It increases the difficulties faced by cleaning ladies in trying to earn a living. But then, who said life was fair?