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After hours of trying, no luck getting help from the IRS

I e-filed my Federal return around February 18.

A week later, I filed a 1040X because my company issued me a W-2c, due to increased wages due to disqualifying disposition in December that didn't get straightened out until February. The 1040X said I owed $147 more, which TurboTax claimed would be direct-debited from my bank account like my original payment from my e-filing.

The original payment was direct-debited on April 18 as expected. The additional $147 was not, and hasn't been since then.

Last week, I got a notice "CP22A" from the IRS: "We made the changes you requested to your 2010 Form 1040 to adjust your Schedule H." I never requested any changes to my Schedule H. The notice said $34.00 in additional taxes plus $0.17 in interest are due by June 20.

I called the number on the notice today to try to straighten out (a) what changes had been made to my Schedule H, since I never in fact requested any, (b) why the payment for my 1040X hadn't been direct-debited, and (c) whether what happened was, as I suspected, that the changes I supposedly requested to my Schedule H were in fact someone screwing up when processing my

1040X. Although why it would take them until May 30 to process a 1040X mailed on February 25, I have no idea.

I spent an hour and twenty minutes on the phone with the IRS. Got transferred four times. Nobody helped me. The final transfer brought me to a recording telling me I had to call the "business and specialty tax line" at a different number, and then disconnected me.

I called the business and specialty tax line and spoke to an operator who said she was transferring me to "accounts." When I heard the recording informing me for the third time in two hours that I would have to listen to that insanity-inducing

30-second-loop hold music for more than 15 minutes, I threw up my hands in disgust and hung up.

Since I work in downtown Boston, I decided I would walk over to the JFK Federal Building and try in person to get help from the Taxpayer Advocate office there. When I got there, I found that the TA's office is a locked door with a security card reader and a phone on the wall next to it. I picked up the phone and told the woman at the other end that I wanted to meet with a TA, and she told me I should go to the walk-in Taxpayer Service center on the other side of the floor. What the point is of having local TA offices in all the states when you can't actually meet in person with them, I have no idea.

So I walked across the floor to the TS office and waited 50 minutes to speak to someone there. The man with whom I finally got to speak for a half hour seemed rather clueless. He could not tell me why my Schedule H had been changed, could not confirm or deny that my 1040X had been received and processed, and could not even provide me with a detailed transcript of my return. He said it was going to be emailed to him on Monday, after which he'd print it out and mail it to me. He also said he had no idea what he or I would be able to learn from it.

After this, I tromped out of the TS office, walked back across the floor to the locked door of the TA office, and called their Boston phone number on my cell phone. I proceeded to spend a half hour on the phone with a woman who I think was trying to be genuinely helpful, but in the end, she couldn't tell me anything more than all the people with whom I'd spoken previously. The only advice she had to offer was to call back the toll-free number on Monday and try again.

I got the distinct impression, about which I could have been mistaken, that she wasn't a "real" Taxpayer Advocate. She made a comment at one point that the "advocate on call had left for the day." I think she was trying to cover for the fact that he had clocked out early for the weekend.

I've now spent four hours today trying to get my tax issues resolved, and I'm really no closer now than I was at the start.

I have two obvious questions:

1) What's the best way to get in touch with someone who will actually be able to help me, without spending hours more being bounced from person to person? Call the TA office again on Monday? Call the toll-free TA number? Call the "business and specialty tax line" and put up with yet another absurd hold because at the end of it will be someone with a clue? Call the general IRS number like the woman at the TA office suggested? Give up on the phone and send the IRS a letter? Something else? Surely the experts in this newsgroup have some good advice about how to proceed.

2) Is there any point in complaining to anyone about this debacle, and if so, to whom and via what channel should I do so?

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Regards,

Jonathan Kamens

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens
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I'd start by ordering a transcript of the 2010 year by calling 800-908-9946 (in case the local Taxpayer Service guy doesn't come through). People here can help you decipher the transcript to see where your account stands.

I've found it is best to ask for Taxpayer Advocate assistance by detailed letter. Though they are usually pretty good about responding to phone calls, a written request that meets Taxpayer Advocate criteria ("..if you have tried to resolve your tax problem through normal IRS channels and have gotten nowhere, or you believe an IRS procedure just isn't working as it should") usually ensures they will open a case to work on your issue.

Probably not much point in complaining. The system has been broken for years in spite of many complaints. Best to seek to resolve your issue and move on.

Reply to
paultry

There is NO option for a direct debit from your bank account on an amended return. There is no place on the 1040-X for any banking information, nor any place for you to authorize a debit. The instructions say check or money order, or use the (third-party) credit/debit card service for a fee.

You did MAIL in the 1040-X, right?

[Not that this explains the confusion about the Schedule H adjustment.]
Reply to
Don Priebe

Done, thanks.

Can you explain to me why the people at the walk-in taxpayer service center are not able to view / print a transcript?

I will do that as well, and I hope a written complaint will have a more beneficial effect than the half hour I spent on Friday dealing with the woman in the TA's office whom I suspect wasn't actually a TA or qualified to be helping me.

Fair enough, but I'll probably send a bitchy letter to my congressman when this is all over.

Thanks for the help.

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

Then I guess I have a bone to pick with Intuit, since the filing instructions for the 1040X explicitly said that the payment would be direct-debited. Sounds an awful lot like a TurboTax bug. I assumed they'd get the bank account information from my original 1040 on file.

The amount of interest I'm going to end up paying is less than a dollar, so it's not like it's worth trying to get Intuit to reimburse me for the bug, but still, I should try to find a way to report to them that their software gave me (and probably others as well) incorrect filing instructions.

Yes.

Thanks for the response.

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

According to IRM 21.2.3.4, Transcripts Procedures,

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email delivery is just one option for retrieving a transcript. If the account was on-line, he could have pulled it up on his computer screen. If the account was off-line, the email route may have been the quickest available to him.

Reply to
paultry

That wasn't really a question. Let me try again...

I simply can't understand why the IRS hasn't taken steps to ensure that something as straightforward and obviously relevant and useful as being able to view a transcript of last year's tax return is always available to IRS employees who are in positions where they are supposed to be helping people solve problems with their tax returns.

Your answer told me how things are right now from a facts-on-the-ground perspective. I'm asking at a higher level than that... why are things that way? Why isn't everyone's transcript available to IRS employees who need to see it to do their jobs, i.e., to help people?

Is there a good reason for this, or is it just incompetence and shortsightedness?

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

My understanding (based on a combination of experience and anecdotal reports) is that when a return is efiled with a payment to be debited IN THE FUTURE, the return isn't fully processed within the IRS system until the payment is received. In fact, it might take up to two weeks AFTER the payment date for the transcript to be fully updated. So, if your payment was scheduled for around April 15th, but you filed the amended return BEFORE that, I suppose it's possible that the amended return found nothing to post against (because the original return had not yet been fully processed) and thus was ignored. Or something like that.

My own recommendation, which I fully realize won't do you any good at this point, is to always wait until several weeks AFTER April 15th before filing an amended return.

MTW

Reply to
MTW

snipped

The reason I was given was because the people working at those service centers are there to exam returns and work out collection problems, NOT to act as a service kiosk for the delivery of transcript info. Its a crappy explanation, but its what the office manager of a local IRS satellite office told me.

To be fair, the people working in those offices are tasked with regular duties - just like anyone else who has a job. Having taxpayers come in off the street and interrupting them to get a transcript, when there are other ways, interfers with their work. I am NOT suggesting that the IRS shouldn't help, just pointing out that it is hard to do scheduled work when you're constantly interrupted. I also understand that because of budgetary reasons the IRS no longer has a dedicated "front desk" person who sits there waiting for walk ins.

Don't hold your breath and don't bother complaining to the Taxpayer Advocate, that's not their function. If you have a legitimate complaint about how the IRS treated you contact the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) in DC.

And for the record, you actually contributed to the problem - though I'm sure it wasn't intentional. You made a common mistake by amending your return too soon. Even though e-filed returns go into the system automatically, they still get processed in batches. Original returns go into "the system" while amended returns get looked at by real live people. By amending just a week after filing the original return its likely that the person given your amended return could not see or get to your original return.

Processing of amended returns can take up to SIX (6) Months.

Without going over your entire return I can't tell for sure, but I'd guess that the CP22A notice was NOT related to your amended return.

What you may want to do is to respond to the CP22A notice with a letter asking for a meeting with a local case officer to resolve your issue. And while you did your own return, you may want to get with a local tax pro who uses the IRS E-Services System (though I doubt it will be cost efficient for you). With E-Services, a tax pro can send electronic communications to the IRS and they generally respond within 3 days or so. They don't always get it done the first time around, frequently because they can't SEE everything they need to from the transcript systems.

And by the way, there are several different transcripts you can request -

1 - wage and income transcript - shows income reported to your SSN; 2 - account transcript - shows taxes, penalties & interest assessed, payments made and adjustments to your account; 3 - return transcript - shows the line item summaries from your return. Does NOT show details - if you had three jobs, each paying you $10K Line 7 of this transcript will show $30K. You'd use the wage and income transcript to get the detail;

When I pull transcripts I pull these three to make sure I can everything the IRS has on file.

Good luck, Gene E. Utterback, EA, RFC, ABA

4 - one more, I think but I can't recall the name.
Reply to
Gene E. Utterback, EA, RFC, AB

I'll remember that for the future, but the problem is that the amended return required that I pay more money, and I didn't want to pay interest.

I suppose I should have sent in a check for the $147 and then filed the corresponding 1040X after April 18.

Of course, I might have had a better idea I was supposed to do that if TurboTax hadn't told me that the $147 would be direct-debited. *sigh*

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

This doesn't make any sense. Paultry's followup was correct. The Taxpayer Service center I want to was specifically intended for walk-ins. They've got a whole system set-up with numbered queues, cubicles, a board and oral announcements indicating which number is currently being served and at which cubicle number, etc.

As far as I could tell, for the people working at the Taxpayer Service center I visited, their work WAS to help walk-ins. As Paultry said, I wasn't interefering with their work; I WAS their work.

There was, in fact, a front-desk person who listened to me briefly describe my problem and then assigned me a number. Interestingly, it was clear that there were several different queues with different numbering schemes, and the dispatcher was putting people in different queues based on the nature of their problem. Alas, that didn't help me talk to someone who could actually help me.

I will do that.

OK, so this kind of thing makes no sense to people like me who do not spend all of their time dealing with the IRS. It also makes no sense to process wonks like me who simply cannot understand why the IRS can't do better than it does.

I e-filed my return. I got back a notice from the IRS that my return had been accepted. As a reasonably intelligent person who has not read the Internal Revenue Manual, I think it was reasonable for me to conclude that once my return was "accepted," it was "in the system" and I could safely file an amended return, and it would be processed correctly.

If that's not the case, well, then, that's just silly. It's broken and it needs to be fixed.

I will do that if the Taxpayer Advocate's office, to which I sent a letter yesterday, does not turn out to be helpful.

I've already sent a payment for $147.90 to the IRS, so I can take my time now and solve the paperwork problem in the manner that is the least work for me. There's no reason for me to pursue multiple avenues (TA's office, local case officer, etc.) at the same time.

Thanks,

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

Today, I figured out on my own, without any help from anyone at the IRS, what I think happened to my tax return. Well, mostly, anyway; there are still unanswered questions.

As I've mentioned previously in this newsgroup, my wife and I employ steady babysitters, and we pay them enough every year to require withholding Social Security and Medicare and remitting them as well as FUTA to the IRS with our tax return each year, on Schedule H.

Unfortunately, I made an error when filling out the Schedule H for 1010 and underreported the amount of wages paid to the various babysitters. I have no idea how this happened, but in any case, it means we underpaid our taxes.

Since we withhold, we have to send our babysitters and the Social Security Administration (SSA) W-2's. I filled out the W-2's correctly, which means the withholding amounts reported on them were different from, and greater than, the amount reported on Schedule H.

I think the SSA provides W-2 data to the IRS, and I think the IRS, upon receiving the correct W-2 data, cross-checked it against my return, corrected my return to reflect the SSA data, and sent me the notice reflecting changes I had supposedly requested.

Unanswered questions:

  • The transcript the guy I saw at the JFK Building mailed me last week shows that my amended return was received, but I was never sent a notice or bill for the amount due under my amended return (recall that I thought it was going to be direct-debited so I didn't send a check). Is it possible that they haven't yet processed the amended return even though I sent it in February?

  • The transcript shows 05-16-2011 as the "Tax return filed" date, which is clearly bogus since my return was filed in February and they correctly direct-debited the payment due from that return on April 18. My best guess is that the date was updated when they changed my return based on the SSA data.

  • The amount the IRS billed me for, , isn't what I actually owe when I correct the error on my Schedule H; I have no idea how the IRS came up with that number.

  • Why hasn't the Taxpayer Advocate's office responded to the letter I sent them a week ago? Is that typical?

To (I hope) fix all this, I'm filing a second 1040X with the correction to Schedule H. I'm enclosing with it the previous

1040X with "PREVIOUS 1040X" written across the top of it and with a note in Section III of the new 1040X stating explicitly that this is my second one; a copy of my amended 1040; and a copy of my amended Schedule H.

I'm enclosing with the second 1040X a check for the additional amount due plus interest. Recall that I already send a check with a 1040-V last week to cover my first 1040X that they never direct-debited or billed me for.

And then I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that the IRS will eventually figure all this out on their own and not bother me again.

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens
Reply to
Gene E. Utterback, EA, RFC, AB

The Taxpayer Advocate finally called me today in response to the letter I sent a week ago. I suppose a one-week turnaround isn't that bad.

My theory about what happened -- that the SSA sent their data to the IRS and the IRS discovered from it that my Schedule H was wrong -- was incorrect.

Rather, it appears that the IRS simply jumped the shark when processing my 1040X. They did not enter the amendments my

1040X said they should make, and instead managed to botch some other data in my return which didn't need to be changed at all.

The Taxpayer Advocate had a copy of my 1040X in front of me when we spoke. She asked me to send her a copy of the second

1040X that I mailed in today, and she's going to try to "merge" them and produce a single 1040X that will correct all of the errors (the IRS's and mine) in my return, and then send the resulting 1040X to me for me to sign and send back to her, at which point she said she'll make sure it gets processed properly.

I have no idea how that's going to interact with the 1040X I mailed in today before hearing back from the Taxpayer Advocate.

At least I've sent the IRS checks at this point for all that I actually owe, so assuming that they credit those checks successfully to my account, when the paperwork nightmare is straightened out I presumably won't owe any interest or penalties.

Reply to
Jonathan Kamens

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