My Audit Experience

This is Bruce's experience in being personally audited by the IRS:

After sitting with a compliance officer for four hours I have come to the conclusion that the IRS must require its employees to have “can I see your documentation” tattooed on the inside of their eye lids. I heard this over and over. Fortunately, I was prepared with the documentation necessary to prove my case. Unfortunately, providing the evidence supporting your case is only half of the challenge. The second half of the challenge is getting the IRS to interpret the evidence the same way that you interpret the evidence, and helping the IRS to see how the evidence relates to the issue at hand. This second half of the challenge was, in my experience, the most difficult part of the process.

When presenting your evidence to the IRS, you must understand the evidence forwards and backwards, since the IRS representative is not experienced with the details of your particular case. Along with not having experience with my particular case, the compliance officer assigned to my case was not familiar with the Internal Revenue Code sections directly related to my case. I was caught off guard by his lack of familiarity with the section of the tax code that was in question. I brought with me the Regulations supporting my position and provided copies of the Regulations to the officer. This proved to be of great benefit since it limited the amount of time the officer had to spend researching the specifics of my case.

The most important thing I would like to share from my experience is the signing of the audit findings. The officer was very persistent in his attempts to get me to sign a statement saying that I agreed with the audit findings. I found this to be very unnerving. Remember that if you are not comfortable with the audit findings you have additional avenues you can pursue.