In our case they’re claiming we received a big payment from retirement account(s). We aren’t close to retiring, and haven’t received anything from any account. It almost looks like they are calling the portion of my pay that goes into the teachers retirement system income and are trying to tax is on it. I’m sure we can get it resolved, but it’ll probably be a pain in the ass.
Yes, we have had it happen. 2015 they came back 2 times I think, and then they sent us a refund. :smack: You might want to get an accountant to sort it out.
No, but twice I had them send me more than I asked for. My DIL looked at my returns and told me I wasn’t taking something I qualified for. That part didn’t surprise me. I was surprised that they corrected it automatically, though.
Yes, but not in a helpful to you way. They were correct, I’d forgotten some stock dividend income. I just mailed them them a check for the amount they were asking for.
It has happened to us. Pertaining to an IRA account we opened a decade ago. We havn’t had a payout on it yet, so we think it will happen again this tax season. We are waiting on the letter. A tax guy can fix it right up for you.
Yes, just got a letter asking for $8K. I had a rollover check issued in Dec. 2016 which was received adn deposited in my other 401K in Jan, 2017. I’m writing them with my backup.
StG
Well, isn’t this strange? I got pretty much the same letter from the IRS today, claiming (as far as I can tell) that I had received an old pension payout in 2016 and hadn’t done something or the other right. Now they’re asking me to remit the amount I’ve already remitted (+$7K), and they tell me I must call them without delay…
What am I supposed to think about this? I’m going out of town tomorrow for a training event, won’t be back until late Sunday. Am I fooling with the IRS in the meantime? Yep, you know the answer to that one.
Peace. Through Strength.
Does the IRS actually asked people to call them? I know being called by the IRS is pretty much a sure sign of a scam, but asking to call them? Might be legit. I’d probably look up the number to call elsewhere though 
Happened to me long ago. Forgot all the details, but I had to write up a bunch of stuff and send a check.
I recall it being a pain in the ass.
I got a letter in 2016 stating I had failed to note a 1099 from a client on my 2015 return. I absolutely had included that 1099 – I always list all 1099s! The IRS claimed I owed them an additional $600 due to my “error.”
I almost just paid it, but then decided that if I was driving down the road, I wouldn’t throw $600 out my car window. So I spent a long day putting together a road map for the IRS from the pertinent parts of my tax return to show I had in fact declared the 1099 income. It was time well spent, because 6 weeks later I got an updated letter from the IRS indicating that I owed nothing more.
I once got a letter telling me I owed the IRS something like $2000 which they asked me to send and helpfully included an envelope.
It turned out I had made an error on how I reported my HSA and that was all. I wrote a letter and filled out an amending form they sent. All correspondence was via mail. They never answered the phone no matter when I called. I also never got any acknowledgement for things I sent or that the matter was settled.
We actually got a call, once (and it was genuinely from the IRS, surprisingly) because we had not filed some form or other dealing with childcare expenses. This was nearly 20 years ago; I think it had to do with the fact that we had a pretax account. There was some reason I thought we didn’t need to do the form that year; it changed our taxes not at all. I provided the info over the phone and it went away.
A decade or so before that, the IRS rules on deductible IRAs had changed, and our joint income was too high to qualify. But by filing separately, my husband was able to make a deductible contribution, and that netted us a lower combined tax bill (it’s the only year where filing separately would have saved us money).
Then the following year, we had to pay some taxes - I think because we sold some stock that was in my husband’s name. The IRS decided we were underpaid enough that we owed a penalty.
We had an accountant friend look over things. He wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out that the previous year, my husband’s tax liability was very low, his withholding the second year was more than enough to cover the previous year’s tax bill, and so he would not have been hit with a penalty if we’d filed separately the second year. So, it went away.
We got letters from our state several years in a row due to unintentional underpayment (well, too-large refunds): I was working in NYC and paying taxes there, and claiming an offset from our home state. Only I did it wrong - NY has a higher rate, and I was claiming a credit for the full amount, versus what I’d have paid here for the same income. So they sent me a letter about 24 months after the first return, and I paid. I also corrected the return I was working on at the time (though I still didn’t get it quite right, and later got a notice I owed a little for that year).
This coming year’s return should be interesting. We’ll be selling some stock to cover educational and medical expenses, and possibly trying to take a medical deduction (the expected expenses ARE high enough to put us over the 10% limit :() and I’m sure the IRS will try to argue something. We also had some expenses we paid through our HSA’s debit card, which were partly refunded - directly to us. I had to mail that via check back to the HSA bank; here’s hoping they code that right, otherwise the IRS will argue with us.