rs-irs-audits

Will I Go to Jail As the Result of Getting Audited by the IRS?

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If you make a mistake on your tax return, the government isn’t going to put you in jail, but if you make a big mistake on your tax return and it was accompanied by the willful knowledge that you intended to make that mistake, the situation is different. For instance, if you said I’m just not going to report any income or I’m going to try and conceal income so I don’t have to pay taxes ie. I’m going to evade taxes or if you deliberately file a tax return that’s false or engage in any of the tax penalties, yes you can go to jail for that. The auditor is not going to be the one that puts you in jail but what happens is with civil audits, which are a great referral source for the criminal division of the IRS, a lot of times what will happen is the government will engage them and they call it a parallel investigation. They’ll have a civil auditor who’s conducting a civil audit, the auditor will find something, and they will report it to the criminal division.

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What Is a Dual Determination?

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So a dual determination happens when you have a situation with a business that either accrues payroll tax liability or sales tax liability. What happens in that case is when you have a payroll tax or sales tax liability with the business, the state or the IRS can hold the officers of the company responsible personally if they did not pay those taxes. So there’s certain taxes that we refer to as trust fund taxes and those are monies that are held in trust for the benefit of somebody else so a common example of this has to do with payroll taxes. When you don’t pay payroll taxes there’s a portion of those payroll taxes that are the employer’s responsibility but there’s also a portion which are the employees responsibility. So for the employees portion of those taxes, the government can hold you responsible for that. What a dual determination really hinges on is who is responsible for the non-payment of taxes, whether they had knowledge or whether they were aware of the fact that taxes weren’t getting paid, and whether they could have done something to pay those taxes. So generally speaking if you are aware of a liability and you chose to pay other creditors that warrant, the government is going to hold you liable. So the dual determination process is a very strategic one because when you have a situation where you have multiple officers

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What Is the IRS Appeals Process Like?

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So, the IRS appeals process is actually reasonably friendly to taxpayers and let me explain why. First of all the function of Appeals technically is to be an independent body of the IRS away from examinations and collections. The sole function of appeals is to resolve disputes between the taxpayers and the government and to do so in a mutually beneficial way. The most common time we run into appeals is usually with respect to when we’re filing a Tax Court petition and trying to work things out. Most of our audits that we do at the firm we will file a tax court petition for and then we’ll try and negotiate with appeals. The benefit of dealing with Appeals is most of the Appeals officers are either former collection agents or they’re formal auditors so they understand what you’re talking about. You’re dealing with professional people who know the same playing field as you and that are a representative that we can communicate with on a high level and get a lot done. Number two is with Appeals you’re dealing with a very high volume of cases, so Appeals is trying to screen cases out prior to litigation. Because it’s trying to resolve disputes, it has a lot more flexibility. They’re dealing with so many cases that if, for example, you’re taking an audit into appeals, appeals isn’t going to go through bank statements. They’re not going to go through receipts but appeals will take a look at the presentation of information and they will make an objective decision independently of the author.

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How Do I Beat IRS Examinations at Its Own Game?

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How Do I Beat IRS Examinations at Its Own Game? So here are some of the tactics that we used when dealing with IRS examinations in order to get the best results for our clients and I’m not necessarily recommending as a layperson that you try and effectuate these strategies by yourself I’m simply letting you know because I want you to see the playing field in terms of how IRS audits actually work and some of the tactical maneuvers that we use to get the best results for our clients again with an IRS audits particularly a field audit you want to make sure that you’re handling the situation with an appropriate amount of deference and usually with field audits you want to get an attorney involved as quickly as possible however here’s the way that we handle the situation number one when dealing with an examination issue we’re trying to be at least a step ahead of the auditor so we’re creating a very defined path and we’re trying to lead the auditor down the path that we want to detect so what this takes is it takes two things number one you need a clear indication on where you’re starting at a point that on so number one what are the facts what documents do I have available to me how are my documents going to line up in accordance with the auditors expectations why is the client being audited what information can I gather about my current situation based on the information I have about my current situation what are the likely outcomes when I get to the end am I gonna pay a tax I know how much tax.

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