Gavin Sanderson

What a Tax Attorney Can Do For You

Provides tips on choosing the best tax attorney for your tax problems.

An IRS audit is not a pleasant thing to go through because it is cumbersome, time consuming, and in many cases, quite expensive. It is a good thing to hire a tax attorney if you are being audited. Another thing to do is to collect all relevant paper work. It is best to collect all financial documents for the year before and after the year of audit, and that year as well. You must also collect all documentation that can be used to show legitimate tax deductions or tax credit that you may have claimed when you filed your return.

Discuss the whole thing with your tax attorney and make sure that you pay close attention to all expenses that are listed under Schedule E, which covers investment property, and Schedule C, which covers small businesses, and also Schedule A, in case you did not itemize your deductions. Larger items will get more scrutiny and among others they include charitable gifts, mileage expenses, contract labor, and cost of goods that you sold, and so on. Make sure to discuss everything in detail with a tax attorney because he or she can help you find all the right supporting documents required during the IRS audit.

Another thing a tax attorney can do for you is to double check all your returns and supporting documents and make sure you did not omit anything. Tax payers are frequently discovering that they have omitted the interest or dividend payments from their small savings accounts or brokerages. It can also happen that tax payers entirely forget to declare these items because the investment company did not send them the required documents. There should be no undeclared income in your papers and in case there is you should have all the supporting documents to explain why it was not reported.

Always keep copies of all your documents to hand over to the IRS because it makes things a lot easier. The IRS agent will prefer to meet the taxpayer in their home or place of business. The reason is that the IRS agent can ask for additional documents on the spot instead of having to resort to a time consuming process like correspondence. Since this is convenient to both the tax payer and the IRS it is a good idea to meet the IRS agent where you can easily gather all documents as may be required.

Taxpayers are also seldom aware of the real role of the IRS examiner which is to assess the maximum amount of tax that an auditee is meant to pay. This results in the tax payer being completely surprised when the results of the audit come back a month later. You must be clear about what is being done by talking things over with the IRS examiner.

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