Page 29 - Escape Your IRS Nightmare Flip Book

Plain and simple, the IRS makes mistakes. We recently had a case where an Offer in Compromise was

rejected because the Offer Specialist entered the miles on the car as 18,500 miles, but it should have
been 185,000 miles. This led the IRS to believe they had equity, but in reality the car has no value! This

one mistake caused the IRS to reject the entire Offer in Compromise which had already taken several
months to get to that point in the process. It is very important for taxpayers to read IRS determinations
line by line, read transcripts line by line, read correspondence line by line. The IRS does make mistakes

that can be catastrophic for you when they are wrong.

We were able to appeal the Offer Specialist’s findings and successfully turned a rejected Offer in
Compromise into an accepted Offer in Compromise just based on the miscalculation of equity in the
taxpayer’s vehicle!

Until I visited the IRS Service Center in person, I imagined the IRS would have a highly complex system
of sophisticated automated machines. But the reality is that much of the correspondence received by

the IRS is received by individuals who don’t even have a computer at their desk to notate in the
taxpayer’s account that a a response was even sent by the taxpayer!

Instead, the mail is sorted into piles and hopefully your letter has a place to go and goes to someone
who will understand what to do with it.

To truly understand the operations of the IRS you need to recognize that in most areas they are working
off of outdated equipment and every department is strapped for resources. The budget for the IRS has

been cut year after year, and so they are trying as best as possible to handle millions of processes on a
shoe-string budget. This results in a manual process by hand which is run by thousands of IRS

employees across the country, and therefore error is probable.

Any time you owe money to the IRS, you should ask for an account transcript for the year that you owe

money on. This will help you follow the trail on what the IRS system shows for your account.

This will also help you pinpoint if the IRS has made a mistake. To the IRS’ benefit, I think they want to

know when they have made a mistake, and they do have ways for you to get errors corrected.

Unfortunately, it’s not an easy or quick process, but it can be done.

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