IRS Instructions as Clear as Mud, Even to the IRS
Tax time is just around the corner and that means it will be time once again to comb through all the jargon that is IRS tax forms. Many taxpayers have long bemoaned tax forms and instructions as just plain confusing and in some cases, downright sinister. However, even though filing taxes on your own accord can be a risky proposition, as long as you stick to the code and follow the IRS’s instructions carefully and exactly, you should be OK, right? Well, not necessarily.
What? How could that possibly be true? The fact is tax instructions don’t actually fall under the tax law. So, in reality, you could even follow the instructions on a tax form with exactness and still end up with an error. Of course, the IRS would understand if that happened to you, right? Well, not exactly. Many taxpayers have used this argument to no avail. In most instances, the courts side with the IRS and rarely hold the agency to what is written in its forms and instructions.
That’s because, unfortunately, according to legal precedence, the only things that hold up in court as tax law are regulations, official statutes and judicial decisions. That means even if you fill out your tax forms incorrectly and it’s the IRS’s fault, you will still be held accountable for those mistakes. It doesn’t seem fair that the IRS is ultimately not responsible to write correct instructions, but nevertheless when it comes to the IRS there isn’t too much that does seem fair.
Should the IRS File Your Taxes for You?
Imagine a world where you didn’t have to file your own taxes. Of course, you can use an experienced and professional tax and accounting firm like GROCO to do your taxes for you, but what if you didn’t even have to send your tax return information to an accountant? Could that ever really happen? In…
Unstable Stock Market Could Hurt State Tax Budgets
While many feel the wealthy should be paying more in taxes, the efforts to enforce this strategy does have some consequences for state budgets. Many of the country’s wealthiest individuals hold the majority of their wealth in stocks. That means when the stock market goes down, so do the tax payments of the wealthy. In…
Florida Looking to Lure More Wealthy Taxpayers
The reports regarding many of the nation’s wealthy packing up and moving to different states in order to avoid the high taxes where they currently reside continue to mount. According to one such report, David Tepper, the president of Appaloosa Management L.P., who is the wealthiest resident of New Jersey, is in fact no longer…
How Long Does it Really Take to Prepare Business Taxes?
How Long Does it Really Take to Prepare Business Taxes? For most people, just hearing the words business taxes is enough to cause uneasy feelings, but for business owners the thought of doing their own business taxes can be a nightmare. Filing individual tax returns can be hard enough but the process gets even more…