I always try to teach my kids the difference between needs and wants. You need to eat dinner; you want to eat at Chipotle. The same applies to an IRS offer in compromise. You need to keep the IRS out of your affairs, and live free from levies and seizures of your property. You need peace from the IRS. But you have seen TV and radio advertisements for the IRS offer in compromise program, and may want to settle and no longer have a tax debt. You want what you've been sold and told - that an offer in compromise is simple, easy, and everyone qualifies. The hard truth is that an ... Read More
IRS requesting a periodic review your installment agreement?
Without warning, it appears in the mail: An IRS notice (CP 522P) informing you that they want to conduct a review your installment agreement. And even worse, the notice threatens that the IRS will terminate your agreement if you do not act in 10 days. Your heart feels like it wants to skip a beat; maybe some panic and IRS anxiety sets in. You have been making your monthly installment payments on time. You have not incurred any new tax liabilities. And you have filed and paid all of your most recent taxes, as the terms of the installment agreement require. In other words, you ... Read More
The life expectancy of an IRS payment plan
How long will your IRS payment plan last? All is quiet between you and the IRS - you have a payment plan, and the IRS is will not be knocking on your door because your account is in resolution. But IRS installment agreements do not necessarily last forever. And that can be both a good and bad thing. The good part of an IRS payment plan is that the IRS has 10 years to collect a tax debt from you. That means that your payment plan will eventually end - to your benefit. This is called the IRS 10 year statute of limitations on collections. After the 10 years are up, the IRS is ... Read More
How to get the IRS to reinstate your installment agreement
You negotiated a monthly payment plan with the IRS, and all was going well - you were making you payments on time, and staying current with your taxes. But you ran into some short-term trouble and filed a tax return with a new liability that you did not pay. The result? The IRS billed you for the new tax debt, and sent you a Notice of Intent to Terminate Installment Agreement, identified in the upper-right hand corner as IRS letter CP523. A condition of the agreement was no new tax debts, and the new liability caused the IRS to consider your agreement in default, and now they want ... Read More
Will the IRS request to change the amount of my installment agreement?
You are finally on good terms with the IRS - you agreed to a monthly payment plan, and have been filing and paying your taxes on time, as you are required to do. With that, the IRS should leave you alone, right? Not necessarily. The IRS has the right to review an installment agreement, and to negotiate a new one to determine if your monthly payment could be changed. And when we say changed, we mean increased.Preview This will usually occur when your installment agreement payments are not enough to repay the IRS back in full. Let's say, for example, that you owe the IRS ... Read More