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Any IRS Tax Lawyer Will Tell You: Taxpayers Can Be Crazy

Submitted by admin on Tue, 3/31/2015 - 4:23 am

As any IRS tax lawyer might tell you, some taxpayers can be a little crazy. For someone who deals with taxpayers on a daily basis, many tax professionals will come across those with a myriad of tax issues. Many may keep all of their tax documents and receipts in a shoebox, or worse, a giant moving box. The disorganization is one of the biggest things that tax professionals have to deal with. Since a lot of the time, they won’t be dealing with the paperwork themselves; they can get pretty careless with their organization level.

Taxpayers Are the Craziest People, April 2015

The disorganization isn’t the only thing that tax professionals have to deal with. The biggest issue most go through with clients is the ideas that they have about their taxes. A lot of people think they know more than the professionals and want to be vocal about their seemingly brilliant ideas. Generally speaking, most of these ideas will go against the law, or make them bankrupt. AccountingToday.com states:

“The favorite taxpayer statement of Donna Sue Henderson of Bristol Tax and Accounting, Bristol, Tenn.: “‘I can’t pay their taxes ’cause then the government will have all my money.'” “I find that funny,” Henderson said, “because the alternative is to not pay and then have the IRS assess late-payment fees and penalties – and sometimes something worse.” Her advice to clients creative and otherwise? “Just pay what you owe before it all snowballs out of control and the IRS starts levying.” Certain types of filing sometimes occasion wrong ideas. For example, Jeffrey Schneider, an EA at SFS Tax & Accounting Services in Port St. Lucie, Fla., finds the biggest misconceptions stem from a detail of business filing. “A client on the cash basis wants to write off a bad due when a customer doesn’t pay,” he said. “It’s foreign to them that since they didn’t record into income, they cannot get the write-off. Another is a loan on a business asset: When I don’t deduct principal, they have a hard time understanding cash expenditure and cash expense.””

These sort of incidents are not specific to any one area. A San Diego tax lawyer will tell you the same stories as a Sacramento tax attorney or a CPA in New York. All over the Untied States tax professionals can share their own horror stories about their clients who may constantly spew their own tax ideas. As a consumer, it’s important to trust your hired professionals and let them do the majority of the thinking in this area.

(Source: Taxpayers Are the Craziest People, April 2015)