Find Out What IRS Knows About You: Get A Copy of Your Tax Transcript

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Find Out What IRS Knows About You: Get A Copy of Your Tax Transcript

by Richard Fonfrias,

J.D. Chicago’s Financial Rescue &

Bankruptcy Lawyer

Fonfrias Law Group, LLC

 

If you have any tax problem that involves the IRS, you don’t want to go forward without knowing all the details. You need to know what IRS knows.

So if you think you owe back taxes – or if you have not filed tax returns – or if you are concerned about any type of IRS problem – you should find out what IRS knows about you.

This includes what the current status of your account is.  What IRS is doing to you.  And what IRS can do to you.

You can get all this information from an IRS account transcript, which can tell you…

1.  Whether the IRS can take money from your bank accounts and wages, or seize your assets.

IRS cannot “levy” (meaning “take from”) your income or seize your assets unless it first gives you written notice, which will come to you in one of two ways.  Either by certified mail, or if a Revenue Officer hand delivers notice to you at home or at your business.

Your IRS account transcript will tell you whether the notice has been issued and when. If IRS has sent the notice, you can legally dispute the intent to levy and stop IRS’s collection. You have 30 days to appeal. And in most cases, by IRS administrative rule that 30 days is extended to one year.

If your account transcript does not show that the notice has been issued, then you’ll know that IRS cannot yet take your wages or assets.

2. The length of time IRS can continue its collection action against you.

IRS has ten years to collect taxes from you, beginning from the date you filed your tax return. After ten years, the law forbids them from pursuing you because the statute of limitations won’t let them continue their collection actions.

Your account transcript tells you when the statute of limitations will force IRS to stop collection action against you and if anything has occurred that will give IRS extra time to collect from you.

For example, IRS is allowed more than ten years to collect your taxes if you filed bankruptcy, submitted an offer in compromise, or filed a collection due process appeal.  Your transcript will indicate how much more time IRS is permitted to collect from you past the original ten year period.

3. The date you filed your tax return, whether there have been any audits, whether the audits changed the amount you owe, and how much money you now owe in taxes, interest and penalties.

4. If IRS filed an estimated income tax return for you if you did not file an income tax return yourself.

The law allows IRS to file a substitute tax return for you, without your permission or signature.  And in almost every case, IRS gets a substitute return wrong because IRS is merely estimating your income and deductions.  As a result, IRS almost always overstates your income tax liability.

Your account transcript will tell you whether IRS has filed a substitute tax return for you and how much IRS calculated that you owe.

You and your tax preparer can file a corrected, original tax return with IRS, cutting the amount of taxes you owe to what it should be, rather than what IRS estimated.

5.  Whether you have the option to file bankruptcy to erase your tax debt.

In some cases, bankruptcy can erase taxes, provided you follow specific rules that revolve mostly around time.

Those rules include that (1) you must have filed your income tax return, (2) you must have filed your income tax return that has taxes owed more than two years before you file your bankruptcy, and (3) the tax must be from an income tax return that was due to be filed with the IRS more than three years before you file for bankruptcy.

Your IRS account transcript allows me to analyze all of these factors to see if bankruptcy is a way for you to erase your IRS tax debt.  And if it is, your transcript will tell us when you will be eligible to file the bankruptcy.

Now you can see why it’s critical to find out what the IRS knows about you – what they have already done – and what they can still do.  Your account transcript tells us everything I’ve explained in this article, which gives us the facts we need to move forward.

Call me today – 312-969-0730 – and I’ll explain how we get your account transcript so we can analyze it and see if we can discharge your tax bill in bankruptcy.