Originally Posted by
Jesse
What's sad is that the America we live in today has commercials of people smiling with pride as they boast of how much they owed the IRS, but ended up settling for so much less.
Those settlements probably aren't what they appear to be for someone who hasn't dealt with the IRS.
A couple years ago my tax preparer didn't include one of my 1099s when he filed. I didn't notice it was missing either, since it was in the pile, just not on the form. IRS noticed it six months later, and the notice said I owed about $20,000.
They put every deduction/expense in dispute. I really owed about $100, plus a little penalty.
Moral of the story, they send you a HUGE bill to get your attention. So when I settled for pennies on the dollar, I didn't get out of $19,850 in taxes, just fixed a small error. I suspect most of those "pennies on the dollar" stories are similar.