Taxation & Estate Planning

Couple Hounded by IRS over $75

By Darrin Mish

Hello, I'm Darrin T. Mish and I'm a tax attorney with an international tax practice based in Tampa, Florida. Almost every day on my blog and in my website at getirshelp.com, we get comments and emails from people who relate to us their horror stories with the IRS, so I thought I would read one here today.

It goes like this. "My fiance and I were living together in North Carolina. It was well after the tax season had ended and we had just moved out of my parents' house. The lived in Illinois. My father called me up to let me know there was a letter from the IRS. They claimed we did not mail all the proper information that they needed.

They sent out a form we needed to fill out and mail back. My parents mailed this form to us by express mail. After filling out the form we discovered that they were claiming we owed $75. Now $75 doesn't seem like a lot to many people, but we were two young adults surviving off of two minimum wage part-time jobs. We then contacted a number listed on the letter.

They were not very helpful and a little rude. We decided it was best to just mail them a check and fill out the form. A few months passed another letter came. We thought they were asking the same thing again. We tried to call again, but my phone disconnected due to poor signal.

Remembering we had paid for the first check with our bank account which was our still active one, I went through bank statements that showed our $75 check had been cashed and we were finally able to call the IRS with some proof. After being put on hold for a long time, we were finally able to get the matter resolved.

Six weeks later our second check of $75 was refunded to us. WE celebrated that night with a trip to TGI Friday's. I felt very relieved to have the matter resolved but angered that it ever happened. I expected the IRS to be a little bit more organized."

That's an interesting point in that, I think, it is generally speaking a very bad idea to deal with the IRS over the telephone. I think a better course of action is to respond to correspondence by US Certified Mail Return Receipt Requested.

In this case, remember their parents had express mailed the IRS letter to them, incurring the cost of at least 15 additional dollars when their parents probably could have scanned, faxed or emailed to them and then they could have responded to the IRS by certified mail with a check if they felt they need to.

The fact that they got duplicate correspondence, that indicated they owed $75 again, is not all that surprising. You see the IRS is a vast organization with over one million employees employed by the Treasury Service, on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service. So it is important to know this is a very large bureaucratic, tangled, byzantian maze of bureaucracy.

So the fact that the computer spit out two letters is not, particularly surprising to me. Just keep in mind that IRS problems can take a while to solve. It takes a lot longer than you would think, because most likely a human being is not looking at your correspondence and is not reacting appropriately.

I think that this story is particularly interesting in light of Timothy Geithner the new Treasury Secretary's revelations before Congress that he had actually had made some mistakes in paying his tax obligations too.

Now if Timothy Geithner can be nominated and confirmed as a Treasury Secretary to the United States and this poor couple owed $75 to the IRS they wouldn't let up on, I just think that's an interesting dichotomy. Let me know what you think and go ahead and comment below.

This is Darrin T. Mish. If you would like to see additional videos or additional information about IRS help and IRS problems, I invite you to visit our website at getirshelp.com.

Full post as published by IRS Problem Solver Blog on February 05, 2009 (boomark / email).