The IRS announced it has a new automated way to raise a substantial amount of taxes from US taxpayers who fail to file US tax returns. The new announcement from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says enforcement is aggressively increasing and has new focus at the IRS targeting billions from non-filers and late filers. This is especially true for those who file extensions on the April 15th deadline and then fail to follow through within the extension period.
The automated systems of the IRS make it much easier to identify non-filing US taxpayers and to provide that information for IRS audits and IRS collections procedures. When you fail to file a US tax return, the statute of limitations remains open for an unlimited period of time. That means the IRS can simply wait 5, 10 or 20 years until you file or have resources and then aggressively pursue collections that include years of unpaid penalties and interest. The new IT systems at the IRS are making it much more difficult to blend in or slip between the cracks at the IRS.
The IRS identified high-income non-filers as one of the agency’s top eight high-priority areas in its annual work plan. Offshore accounts, investments and income as well as FBAR compliance remains at the head of the IRS’ targeting list.
“With effective program management controls, the IRS can identify and address delinquent individual taxpayers with expired extensions of time to file,” said TIGTA Inspector General J. Russell George in a statement. “This is essential for the high compliance risk area of non-filing.”
In response, the IRS noted: “We will use your findings and recommendations, coupled with data analytics research that we plan to undertake, to help refine our Nonfiler Program strategy, with a dual goal of prioritizing as much of this work as our resources will allow and also developing a process for selecting productive nonfiler cases,” wrote Karen Schiller, commissioner of the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division.
The Inspector General has the IRS targeting billions from non-filers and US taxpayers who fail to file a return, especially after an extension is filed in April. If you have not yet filed IRS tax returns we invite you to contact the experienced accountants, tax preparers and IRS tax attorneys at Allen Barron for a free consultation at 866-631-3470.
