Joke of the Day: "Taxpayer Advocate"

[BobKamman]

I’m still on the Taxpayer Advocate’s Do-Not-Call list. I rarely ask my local office for help, because I know how useless they are except in the easiest cases. Still, I am always surprised when I don’t even get a “Forget About It” response to a Form 911. I made them look bad a few times, but that was years ago. Nevertheless, the grudge remains.

Someone stole my client’s identity and filed a return using his name and SSN claiming $50,000 in fuel tax credits. He’s a retired letter carrier, works part time, well into his 70s and a widower. As honest as the day is long. Correspondence audit in September told him they were disallowing the claim. No details, and no reference to the actual 2022 return he had filed on time and paid a couple thousand tax. You always have to watch out for those September letters because they’re under pressure to close cases before the end of the fiscal year.

Of course we responded. Of course it didn’t help. Come December, they need to close cases by the end of the calendar year. So the Notice of Deficiency arrives, with no indication they had looked at our response.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to pay the $60 Tax Court filing fee and let some GS-12 in Appeals hand the case over to a GS-13 in Chief Counsel. That’s what these people do, clean up messes created by a GS-4 at the Service Center trying to make quota. But to collect an award of attorney fees, I have to show we exhausted administrative remedies. So, try the Taxpayer Advocate, right?

Form 911 was filed on December 12. No response, so the Tax Court petition was filed tonight. Have to keep in practice, you can do the whole thing online now. It will probably take a year to settle as a “no change.”

What's funny is that Congress enacted a statute, back when it was interested in reforming IRS, that required Notices of Deficiency to provide a description and location of the Taxpayer Advocate.  But as we all know, the TA never gets involved once a case has gone that far.  Although, there's no law against it.