Administrative Procedures - Fun in the Tedium

This week I felt like integrating some of my personal fondness for tax representation with a very important and oft forgotten aspect of tax resolution work: recording and verifying administrative procedures. What are administrative procedures? Well, they are the processes and rules that the IRS must follow when interacting with a taxpayer. When those procedures are not followed, they provide an opportunity for many unknowing taxpayers. These procedures are dictated by the Internal Revenue Code and when it does not stipulate how to go about specific situations, IRS interpretations such as Revenue Rulings or court cases can provide guidance. When it comes to resolving any tax problem, careful and thorough recording and adequate documentation of each and every event that you and the IRS does can be highly useful if and when the IRS makes a mistake.

As an Enrolled Agent, I have come to enjoy and greatly appreciate attention to administrative records. In fact, prior to my enrollment with the IRS I read David Foster Wallace’s uncompleted The Pale King: a hilarious, yet insightful novel about people working at the IRS.

While I don’t pretend to have any literary background such that I feel confident interpreting a distinguished author of our time, I do find some good meaning in the novel. In my mind, Wallace wants us to question the tedium that is the modern world and look in at ourselves and how we deal with it. Am I rambling? Possibly. I do think that very few would argue that society now lives on order and that is dictated by what? Administrative procedures!

We have to deal with and account for all the actions that take place to better our own lives. Resolving a tax problem is by no means any different and, in fact, one of the better times to maintain this diligence. As an Enrolled Agent, I write down and attempt to get documentation showing every action the IRS takes. There is little doubt that the IRS is a byzantine with a near impossible job of providing taxpayer revenue to the Federal Government. Furthermore, with how rare it is to talk to the same IRS employee twice and the automation that has become so integral to IRS’ function, it’s easy to see that many many mistakes are made.

There are many occasions where a taxpayer is issued a notice of deficiency of taxes that was sent to a completely different person but with the same name. In other situations, the IRS attempts to assess additional taxes after the 3 year statute of limitations on assessment has ran out. This is one of those lucky times where you wouldn’t have to pay any additional taxes, even if you truly owed them! But you need to have a timeline of these events and documentation to support them and then inform the IRS of what has occurred and defend yourself using your rights under the law. I’ve seen taxpayers that have been strung along by IRS employees for months while the IRS actually didn’t follow their own procedures.

In my mind, there is little doubt that maintaining a record of the events (i.e. administrative procedures) that occurred is the tedium that Wallace wanted us to question in The Pale King. While it may not be initially fun, it is the backbone of the world we live in and can assist many of us in ending our tax problems. Take the time to account for all these steps or, at minimum, give me a call and let me do it for you as who really spends their morning blogging about administrative procedures in the IRS…

 

Ryan Jacobs, EA

MKA Tax Resolution Services