Trying to work with an IRS tax debt is intimidating and frightening and if you find yourself receiving certified letters, telephone calls or even visits from an IRS agent like I did, then you might feel nearly frozen not able to think of what step to take next. What will help is qualified IRS tax relief and you can find it just like I did and like thousands of other tax payers are doing each day.
1. Don’t ignore your IRS tax problem . This is a place I went wrong. It certainly was not that I was disregarding the letters and phone messages I just did not know what to do with them. I didn’t have the funds to pay the debt and communicating with the IRS agent was intimidating but by not dealing with it my penalties, interest and late fees nearly doubled my debt .
2. Don’t try to settle by yourself. When I finally got “caught” on the telephone with an IRS agent he got me to sign into an agreement. This was a huge mistake! What the agreement was they gave me 120 days to pay as much as I could of my bill and then they stated they would give me a settlement for the remaining balance . So I scrapped together $8,000 dollars in the time frame thinking this would show I was really working to pay the debt and that they would go easier on me. What happened was that at the end of the 120 days they added on exactly $8,000 in penalties! They exhausted the exact amount I mailed them and didn’t reduce my balance by even a penny – crazy !
3. Hire a tax consultant. I was very reluctant to do this early on because I thought I could settle this debt on my own and the last thing I wanted was to hire someone to help me . This however is what resolved my problem.
The first thing I did was got on the Internet and researched a tax consultant, it does not have to be anyone local. I filled in the brief online form that asked about eight questions about my issue and then I had a tax consultant working with me on a strategy to follow. The most appreciated thing was that the tax consultant took over all discussions and communications with the IRS for me! I greatly appreciated this because I couldn’t stand speaking with the IRS agents because I always felt that they were attempting to get me to say something I would regret.
The tax consultant settlement got the IRS to almost wipe out my penalties, lower the total amount I owed and this was such a relief because I was really close to losing my business and who knows what else.
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