Oh don't worry. When you get an audit notice you get assigned an agent dedicated to your case. You can talk to them easily. They will talk to you all the time. It's amazing. The question and answer flow is just non ending.
I got an audit notice once. The agent never answered his phone or my voicemails. Ended up having to actually drive down to the Federal Building and hunt down his cubicle on the deadline date.
That said, the process was pretty smooth, and since I wasn't trying to pull any tax shenanigans, not all that upsetting. There are any number of corporations whose customer service is far worse than the IRS's.
I made an error on my tax form one year causing the IRS to say I owed a whole year of taxes, and I was able to resolve it amicably even after they realized they weren’t going to be getting any money from me. When you are in accounts payable, the service does get better.
I’m in one of those now again because we forgot to file the 1099s for the RSUs sold to satisfy my wife’s ordinary income tax on RSU grants. Of course, since it was sold to pay ordinary income tax the cost basis adjusts all the way up, they haven’t gotten back to me yet.
Every interaction with the IRS I’ve had has been top notch, if sometimes excruciatingly slow.
That includes the “you forgot cost basis in day trading so you made fifty million dollars” letter a friend got, to the “you are an idiot and filed wrong, here’s the few grand we owe you unless you really want to contest” because of forgetting withholding.
I had to do this years ago when someone registered my email address on an online dating service, I kept getting spam from it. I sent support requests, messages, help tickets, asking for them to remove my address or change it - no response.
Used the "forgot password" link, logged in, posted porn. Account deleted in about 5 minutes.
Did the site not have a way to delete the account once you logged in, or did you not feel like spending time looking for it given that you had already had your time wasted by them?
But I do worry ... that I may not get an audit notice. I thought that as an American, I was entitled to one, since people go one about this all the time. In 35 years, I've never received one.
Oh wait ... the audit rate is 0.38%
Oh and wait again ..
> Of the more than 164 million individual income tax returns filed with the IRS last year, only 626,204 were audited—down from 659,003 during fiscal year 2021. Of those 626,204 audits, 93,595 were regular audits while the remainder (532,609) were correspondence audits, which are usually done for simple mistakes on a tax return and can be easily corrected through mail correspondence with the IRS.
The IRS gained this reputation in the 1980’s when audits were much more common and likely to happen to middle class people.
It may have been warranted, though, because Congress passed a law that required people to provide a social security number for the dependents claimed on the return. Before that, you could just claim you had a dependent without providing proof. And, lots of people did just that.
Also in the 1980's, corporate customer service was still staffed by reasonably competent and empowered employees. So having that for comparison, the government failure modes of incompetence getting entrenched plus layered bureaucracy looked quite poor.
Now the corporate fashions have gotten rid of all the competent reps, through underpay and disciplining anybody that speaks up. And corporations have developed even more bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility than government! Add in the cherry on top of offshoring (heavy accent plus lowest-bidder voip jitter), corporate customer service has become generally terrible.
So with that backdrop, one expects that calling the government will be even worse. But what you actually find are reps that have the bandwidth to actually understand at least some of what they're talking about, as they haven't been squeezed like the corporate world has.
A dependent saves you a rather small amount of tax. By my understanding, audits are focused primarily on failure to report actual income, or claiming outsized business expense.
That said, the process was pretty smooth, and since I wasn't trying to pull any tax shenanigans, not all that upsetting. There are any number of corporations whose customer service is far worse than the IRS's.