By Megan L. Brackney
Procedurally Taxing
January 6, 2020
The IRS has been assessing more and more foreign information return penalties on taxpayers. It is difficult to find statistics on this point, as the IRS’s reports on tax penalties lump all “nonreturn” penalties into one category, which includes failure to file Forms 1099, 8300, and other information returns, along with foreign information return penalties. Even without the statistics, tax controversy practitioners know this to be true, as we have clients coming in with these assessments every day. Many of these penalties are being systematically assessed, meaning that a penalty is automatically issued whenever there is a late-filed form or a form is missing information, without regard to the individual circumstances of the taxpayer. In many cases, the penalties are wildly disproportionate to the taxpayer’s mistake, and serve no purpose other than to discourage taxpayers from voluntary compliance.
The increase in penalty assessments has also increased the workload of IRS Appeals and there are significant delays in resolution. As will be discussed below, while these appeals languish without any response or action, the IRS continues to move forward with enforced collection. This is a waste of the taxpayer’s resources to be constantly receiving notices and attempting to call and correspond with the IRS, and sometimes filing multiple appeals because they have to resort to Collection Due Process (“CDP”) to stop the IRS from levying on their assets before their appeals are heard. This is also a waste of resources for the IRS, and further burdens Appeals, as more CDP requests come in on cases that are already assigned to Appeals.
The IRS has caused this chaos from overreacting to taxpayers who have filed late or incomplete foreign information returns while at the same time, not allocating additional resources to Appeals to deal with the additional volume, or instructing Collections and Service Center personnel as to how to handle these cases. There are some very simple administrative fixes to these issues, which I will recommend at the end of this column.
To provide some context, and hopefully to bring some order to the chaos, this column tells the stories of three taxpayers who have faced assessment of devastating foreign information return penalties and have been unable to get the IRS to consider their defenses, followed by ten recommendations for improvement.
Click here for Part Two
Click here for Part Three
