Tax Matters - The Top Tax Defenders Blog

Uh oh. You have a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. Why, oh, why? What did you do, or not do (as the case may be)?

In the case of Letter 6174-A, it just means that the IRS believes you may have messed up your taxes because you didn't correctly report cryptocurrency transactions. That's all it means. If you did everything correctly, you don't even need to respond. 

Still, what is all this about?

Identity theft is a serious disruption to the life of anyone it touches. Your credit score, bank account, and more are at risk. What you may not realize is that someone could file a fraudulent tax return using your information. 

Receiving mail from the Internal Revenue Service is enough to make anyone’s knees quiver. It almost always means you owe more money to Uncle Sam for one reason or another. In the case of a Notice of Deficiency, formally known as CP3219A, it means that the information you provided with a tax return does not match up with the information a third party sent, like a bank for an employer.

As if the U.S. tax code wasn't complicated enough, the IRS also wants its share of your Bitcoin transactions. The problem is, of course, that you may not have written down every single taxable event you created with your Bitcoin, probably because you never knew you were doing it.

If your tax bill is too hefty for a single payment this year, you have options. The IRS can offer you an installment payment plan to help you spread your payments out over a number of months. While it's stressful to have tax debt of that magnitude, an installment agreement can make it more manageable.

You didn’t file or pay your taxes this year because…reason. If you have the right reason, you may be able to request a waiver or tax penalties from the IRS. Believe it or not, the IRS isn’t completely heartless and, for a government agency, it can actually make sense once in a while.

Daycare and summer camp are two of the main drivers of spending on children under the age of 13 in the United States. According to the American Camp Association, there are more than 14,000 day camps and overnight camps in the U.S., with over 14 million kids and adults attending at their last count in 2013. Over 5 million children under the age of five are in some form of childcare.

Are you planning to travel out of the country this summer? We hope you are not in tax debt because that could put a damper on things. Did you know that starting in February 2018, the IRS directed the State Department to deny or revoke passports of those owing $51,000 or more in back taxes?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

If you somehow missed all the clues that Tax Day is April 15 (every year), or all the specials from tax preparers running up to this year’s Tax Day, you may be wondering what to do now.

Taxes become more complicated every year, and it doesn’t look like that trend will end anytime soon. We have gathered some of the most popular posts of the last tax year so you can get an idea of the kind of problems people are trying to solve and to put some of our most valuable advice in one spot.