Beginning in April, a number of IRS notices began hitting mailboxes. Unfortunately, the notices are coming in cold, as the IRS is turning on mailing their notices after a long time of being turned off. Their process is creating a lot of undue alarm, right in the middle of tax filing season.
What is happening
The IRS turned its notice system back on after a long hiatus during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it appears no review or adjustments were made before the notices were turned back on. So that may mean a number of things:
There was no correspondence back from taxpayers to clear up errors over this time period. These are errors the taxpayer did not know about because notices were turned off.
The letter cycle clock never stopped. This means instead of getting the next notice in the series, you might receive the fourth or fifth letter in a series.
Even when an IRS error is identified, that communication does not necessarily get passed to the collections (levy ) group. So the levy activity may still be going on, even though an error is now known.
What to do
If you receive a notice, don’t panic, but don’t ignore it.
Call for help in order to respond to the IRS in a timely manner. This almost always means 30 days, so it can generally be handled right after the upcoming tax filing deadline.
Since little review appears to be done on many of these open tax cases, that missing step will typically be your first step to help clarifying and fixing the problem.
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