What Do I Do If I Have Not Filed Taxes for Multiple Years?

So the first thing to do when you haven’t filed taxes is you need to get your taxes filed. If you can arrive at how much you owe the government, you can begin fixing the problem. So the first thing you need to do is establish your filing compliance: how many years haven’t you filed, what information do you need to get it filed and then get your returns filed. So in some cases we’ve had situations honestly where clients don’t remember what years they have and have not filed for, so the appropriate solution in those cases is to call the IRS and to do what we refer to as an analysis. An analysis is a comprehensive review of your account to determine what returns you filed, what returns you haven’t filed, what returns the government has filed for you and any other pieces of information that you would need in order to get in to compliance. Like what information does

the government have on record for you. In doing the analysis you’re going to start to create a roadmap of everything you need to do to get in filing compliance now. Just because you haven’t filed a return in a particular year doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to do so. So we see this a lot with older tax years. If you have a return that’s close to the statute of limitations following collections and the government has filed for you, you don’t want to file a return. Let the statute expire and let that liability wipe itself out so when we do an analysis, it’s not just handing you a list of what returns you need to file. It’s going through and actually figuring out what the solution is and the solution doesn’t necessarily depend on the IRS although they they factor into it. The solution’s about what the goal is. What are your goals for resolving the matter? In order to put yourself in filing compliance when we give you that list you file all your returns and then once the returns have been filed you’re going to get to a number and then once you have that number you can determine what collection resolution is most appropriate for you but from a non-filer perspective even if you haven’t filed like 20 years of returns there’s always a solution that you can put in place to make life easier.

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