Posted on 05/30/2014 4:37:35 AM PDT by Luke21
My wife and I are in our mid fifties. We are grandparents. We have tried to play by the rules. Yesterday, I came home from lunch to find his and her notices in our mailbox from the IRS. The fiends have recalculated our income from a few years back and now suddenly want over 21,000 dollars in fees and penalties. They don't even audit you anymore. They just recalculate and demand payment. This is how they operate.
So if this thing is worked out, we will pay five hundred bucks a month to the IRS for most of our remaining working years, all the while being told we are white privileged to work and be slaves. And there is nothing to stop them from doing it again and again to me or to you. This government is truly monstrous.
And look what we get from our government, if they were a business I would refuse payment for their crappie work.
I have a question. Is it harder for the IRS to audit you, if you send in a paper tax return versus a online? I would think it would be much easier for them to audit you if it is sent online , as the computer can more readily flag errors. A human being would have to personally look through it themselves if a paper return was mailed to them.
I had this happen to me a few years ago. I got a letter that I owed more than 200K I called my accountant very worried. I always give the government their due.
He explained that these initial letters come out of machines and the machine did not pick up a real estate transaction. So he wrote letters and told me not to panic. Took almost a year of letter writing before things were cleared up and I got the letter that said I owed zero. That was a relief.
So get to a good accountant if you don’t already have one.
Thanks for your support. We all know the IRS is wonderful.
Paper returns are scanned anyway, and OCR is used to convert the numbers on the return into a digital form.
Scanning can introduce errors, so you are more likely to encounter an audit for that reason.
However, it does take time for them to scan it. The clock starts ticking as soon as you file it.
“recalculated our income from a few years back”
No details provided. About fifteen words total.
IF you only worked on a W-2 basis, you can fight this quite easily.
There is a very good chance that someone stole your ID & was working under your name & SS number. IF so, you can demand that records from the ‘employer’ be produced.
A similar problem cropped up in N Nevada a few years back. A lady who had worked for the same construction contractor employer for many years got such a notice. When she refused to back down & pay the IRS, it turned out that a Reno McDonald’s owner had a large number of illegals on his payroll & her stolen ID was just the tip of the iceberg.
A raid during only ONE of 3 shifts at his multiple McDonald’s locations produced 63 illegals. He was fined over a million dollars for such shenanigans.
This year, a good friend received a 1099 from a company she worked for OVER 16 years ago. Shen then saw single & lived at a different address. This 1099 came to her under her current married name & at her current married address. She hasn’t worked for anyone in most of those years, as she is raising a family. I don’t know the current status of her 1099 problem for 2013, which is totally bogus, but I gave her the best advice I could. I said to GO IN PERSON to the local IRS & tell them what she knew. I advised her AGAINST going to the company which issued the 1099, since her bogus info could be part of a MUCH larger problem & fraud. I had forgotten about this bogus data, and will try to update myself as to her current status with the IRS.
I am a life long bookkeeper. DO NOT buckle & pay these demands from the IRS. This could be a much larger problem & multiple instances of ID fraud could be behind all of this. Some employers are guilt of this fraud. Some employers get fooled by very good forgeries of ID.
Good Luck—but fight this. It is another part of the dramatic number of illegals who are in the USA.
Get a very good accountant in your area & fight.
Thanks for the encouragement. That is definitely something I’ll look into.
No and, as another post has said, the process of conversion into computer data can unnecessary errors. in previous days there were hundreds of human operators sitting in front of various types of data conversion machines to put an individual tax return into machine-usable form.
Now it is mainly OCR and the like unless the writing (and I have seen some of these) is so bad as to seem deliberate to make trouble. THESE would be ones to provoke CLOSE examination I would guess. "Poking a stick at a tiger!"
Don't panic.
Do not send them a dime. Read the letter VERY carefully. It should outline why they think you owe more. In our case it turned out that the debt on a credit card that was opened in our name (Stolen identity a few years back) had been written off. They had BTW sent the notice letter to the thief rather then to us. This raised our income by the forgiven amount and lowered all our deductions.
It took slightly over two years of sending papers back and forth. But things got squared away. We did not own anything because it was not our debt that was forgiven.
Before you make the first call though get a note book and log down every move you make on this issue. Who you talked to, when you talked to them, who you were transferred to, (this may happen numerous times). Get their name and title and write it all down.
Another hint:
IF you are audited for ‘contributions’-—only take your records for your contributions. NEVER take anything else to an audit. IF they see you with an entire box, they can get really inquisitive right there & then.
There is still a lot a professional can do. We can assist in getting penalties waived, particularly if reasonable cause or first time, we can find other errors which are likely for do-it-your-self's, and most importantly we can help amend the state return which will follow the IRS demand.
We can also assist in keeping the time frames from expiring by helping file a tax court claim if a notice of deficiency is filed. Tax court appeals people are more knowledgeable and more flexible than IRS clerks handling CP2000's.
Finally, we get more respect when dealing with IRS for tax adjustments and especially for working out payment arrangements. The IRS tends to bully regular taxpayers but not pro's.
No discernible difference for CP2000 letters which are simply matching amounts to reported amounts.
For regular audit, the program used to select return for audit may not use paper or efile as an attribute but when it goes for desk review before contacting taxpayer a return prepared by professional may bias the reviewer away from audit. The desk review is somewhat subjective.
I am 57 and divorced. Irs came after me after i donated to a few conservative folks. 2010-2011 the cane after me for 2002 and 2004. Killed me fnancially.
Thanks for the ping, foxfield.
FReepers, you can’t make this stuff up!
Yet another reason to replace the income tax with the FairTax and abolish the IRS!
At http://www.fairtax.org, you can find out how to help us do that!
The IRS is a mixture of thugs, liars and incompetents.
They tried to pull a similar thing on me this year, but fortunately for me, my taxes are prepared by a professional who wrote the IRS a letter and told them to get bent.
Get yourself a tax attorney and have him review your situation and respond to the IRS. These creeps are simply trying to intimidate people into paying money they don’t owe.
This chit has been going on for DECADES!
Several years ago, an old friend who is a nationally published investigative journalist, invited me to go along to his Atlanta interview of two female IRS whistleblowers.
Among serious allegations of MAJOR sexual harassment by male superiors – who were routinely promoted to higher positions and/or transferred in order to display their genitals to NEW female subordinates – we were told of the “Dialing for Dollars” program then – and apparently STILL – a routine practice.
Any agent behind in his/her “collections QUOTAS” (which we’ve been assured by IRS do NOT exist) would rummage their “inventory” (their quaint name for taxpayers in their grasp – er – jurisdiction) for lower middle income individuals with foreign or Hispanic surnames. The agent would phone these individuals, advising them that errors in their returns indicated that they STILL owed the IRS money. The amounts were kept at or under $500.00 on the basis that it would cost the taxpayer considerably more in funds and/or time away from a low to moderate income job to contest it.
In 9 cases out of 10, the taxpayer meekly sent a check just as the “massa” in Washington has conditioned us to do.
Is this a great country or what???
PS: One of those whistleblowers, Sherry Jackson, while ill spent time in prison on some trumped up charge for having the AUDACITY to speak out.
PS: And WHO pays for the tax atttorney???
Repost w/o language deficit.
Of course, there would be no chance of error in either method.../sarc
;-)
This whole discussion gets me to think that I may be in trouble for this years return, because I sold about $5000 in stock options in my IRA to be used for medical purposes only...That is what the manager of my investment account said he would note on the sale of that stock, and the subsequent paperwork he would file with the government...
I would still have to pay taxes on it though, but not a “penalty”, which I kinda believe is still a “tax punishment” because “how dare I benefit now with the money I have tucked away and not used till now for a legitimate need” in the tax law...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.