I have been on an installment agreement with the IRS for a few years and have never missed a payment nor have I been late with one. I received a certified letter from them yesterday stating that they intend to terminate my installment agreement due to lack of payment. I have all of my confirmations from payments made. My problem is that I can’t get through to a IRS representative to sort this out. The message I get is that my “issue” is not important enough to get a rep on the line. Apparently they are so overwhelmed that only 40% of taxpayers will be able to get through this tax season.
Does anyone have any suggestions or advice?
Contact your congressman and/or a tax lawyer.
Find out what the appeals process is for decisions like this and appeal the decision. Typically, this prevents any further action (e.g. incurring late fees/interest, collection efforts, etc.) until the decision has been properly reviewed, which is good, because appeals tend to take a while (several weeks to a few months).
If the IRS were less busy, you could be nice and ask them to review their information, they’d realize their mistake, apologize, and things would go back to normal. Since they won’t even listen to a polite request right now, you have to essentially call bullsh*t on them.
I took one more shot at it and whad’ya know. I got through. I have a 30 minute wait time, but I won’t complain. Hopefully I can get this resolved quickly. Thanks for the advice.
Since the OP is looking for advice, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Your congressman most likely will simply refer you to the Taxpayer Advocate Service; a tax lawyer will probably charge incredible sums to deal with what is most likely a clerical error somewhere.
If you cannot resolve it on the phone, file a written appeal, following whatever instructions are in the letter. If there’s nothing in the letter about appeal, file with the Taxpayer Advocate Service.
They did the same thing to me about a year ago; I got them on the phone, told them I was faithfully paying and wasn’t sure what the issue was. They did some computer magic, and discovered that my payments were being applied to the debt under my former (deceased) husband’s name, not mine. Why this happened after three years of paying I have no idea (other than the possible correlation between getting a new payment address- previously I’d been sending it to Missouri, and then they moved it to Ohio), but they got it straightened out post haste. Hopefully yours will go as smoothly.
I got the situation rectified. They re-instated my agreement with an apology. It turned out to be easy peasy, but I was in panic mode none-the-less. You don’t want to get in bed with the IRS if you can avoid it.