The IRS

I spent more than an hour working with the IRS to clean up an inquiry they sent me.

The all started with a letter from the IRS that said I owed a bunch of taxes from the 2005 tax year - roughly $17k!! When I received this there was a bit of panic. First was the amount, then it was a bit of embarrassment. You see - I do my own taxes, so how could I have screwed up that badly.

I went back through my taxes and found everything that they pointed out as missing with the exception of one item. So I went back, recalculated my taxes after adding this item in, found that I owed roughly $1,000. So I sent them all of the information and a check.

I then received a letter stating that the inquiry was closed. It didn't mention the check that I sent. It just said they closed it.

So I called them to ask what this meant. Did I actually calculate the new amount correctly? That seemed pretty amazing. Or did they decide that I didn't owe them anything? After a long conversation, the person from the IRS said that it looked like I owed $17. So I would either get the amount I sent less $17 or they would forgive the $17 and send me back all of my money. I was suppose to get a check in about two weeks.

About a month passed. I never received a check. So today I called them back to see what happened. The first person I talked to said (after being put on hold a number of times) that they should have sent me a check but it appears that they messed up. She said she would put a note in my file so that the check would be cut and sent. But she said no-one would read the file so she needed to transfer me to Fresno so that they would open the file and proceed with cutting the check. You can imagine wonder about where she was and why I needed to talk to someone in Fresno - but we will ignore that for now.

I then talked to another person at the IRS - this time in Fresno (how would I actually know, and why do I care ...). Anyway she said that they would need to cut a check. She would pass my file along and I should hear something in a couple of weeks. I asked her what I would be getting back. Her answer was, "I don't know." She said she thought that it would be the whole amount plus interest ... I asked her how I would hear back from them. Her answer was, "I don't know." Starting to sound like a Bill Cosby routine. She said she though I would receive a letter. I asked her what the letter would say. She said ... Anyway, seems that case has been handed to AUR Audit Recon. I did find that using google. It is Audit Reconsideration. Kind of the place where things go that got screwed up:)

What was the point of that. Well, not really much. Just kind of amazing. Seems they would be pretty good at this kind of thing. And given everything else that I have been doing with FreshBrain - really a waste of my time. And now I have blogged about it so it cost me even more.