The IRS is Normal and Normal can be trouble. Normal people lose stuff. Normal people forget to document their conversations. Normal people make promises they can’t keep. Normal people make mistakes. You can’t rely on the IRS to keep track of your case so you need to be abnormal, and document everything!
The W Tax Group is on a roll and operating at full steam. As we get everything in order and look forward to April 15 (our favorite day of the year!), I felt it appropriate to reiterate a simple but important core tax principle; you can never document too much.
IRS representatives, agents, and officers are by no means “bad” people. They are normal people just doing what they’re told
(Ok, not ALL of them are normal). Well, guess what? Normal can be trouble. Normal people lose stuff. Normal people forget to document their conversations. Normal people make promises they can’t keep. Normal people make mistakes.
Here’s a perfect example. A have a client from years ago who incurred a huge tax liability during the real estate meltdown, and as a result, could not pay anywhere near what he owed. The IRS agreed to let him make payments – surprisingly, over a period of years instead of just quarters, and this client did what he was told.
Every quarter, he sent a check to the IRS and documented those payments within his own paperwork. After three years, he had finally paid down his liability and sent in the last check.
freedom!!! Right? WRONG!
Our beloved IRS lost his paperwork and told him to simply keep making payments until they “figured it out”.
As you can imagine, I did not react too kindly to the IRS. Now, years later with the benefit of hindsight and a few more years under my belt and I can see that the reaction of the IRS was perfectly “normal.”
…And that is one of many reasons why you need a tax expert (in my case, an Attorney) to make sure that you keep your money and don’t lose even one penny of it due to IRS error.
How do I do that? As you might expect, copious documentation and clear communication. We know the standards of the tax code – all 74,000 pages of it. The number of business deductions available to small companies in the LLC, S-, and C- corporate designations are long (that’s the understatement of the year).
It just isn’t realistic for any normal person to keep track of it all, so we do it for you. So I’m not “normal” and, to be honest, I like it that way.
Now, to get back to “normal” – it is January. Most of us, especially in the middle of winter, cannot focus on the idea of Spring or that April 15th is just around the corner. My suggestion? Now is a good time to be abnormal and go ahead and schedule an appointment to start sorting out 2016’s returns. Just click here to go ahead and schedule a meeting with me. Let’s take all the worry away and give you a clear strategy for this year’s return and an amazing plan as we look forward to 2017.
