Why Our Country Is Failing

I have a client. He's being audited for the second year in a row. The items he's being audited for are Medical Expenses, Charitable Donations and Miscellaneous Business Expenses. He doesn't deduct medical expenses because his income is too high, we attach copies of all his charitable donation receipts when the return is filed and his miscellaneous business expenses are negated by the alternative minimum tax. In other words, this type of audit is like jerking off without release. A pointless exercise that only results in someone being chaffed.

So, the first year of the audit, I try to contact the IRS but their systems are such that nobody takes calls in the last hour of their shift, nobody takes calls early in the morning and when you wait for an hour, the system eventually boots you. So, I sent a letter. The leter provided copies of the charity, AGAIN, pointed out that there are no medical expenses to audit and we requested that we not go through the process of compiling expenses that won't do anything to the return but will cost my client money in accounting fees. They respond with a no change letter and my client signs and returns it. Little did he know, the no change was in dollar amount, not in the expense audit. They disallowed all the expenses, other than the charity. Net result, IRS gets nothing but the state he lives in gets a couple grand. Thanks IRS, for nothing. You lose, he loses, the state wins. Good work. Taxpayer money wasted.

So, he gets the same letter for 2006. I spend countless hours trying to get someone on the phone and I finally got thru this morning. To a woman who, unfortunately, said her ID number too fast for me to write down. She sounded like she might have been from the south and she was angry that I was asking questions. I asked her why the IRS would audit a return for medical expenses when not one expense is even listed on the return. I asked why they would ask that we attach documentation of charity with the filing and then ask for the same fucking thing a year later, when they should have it in their system and, lastly, I asked why we had to go through the motions with this pointless exercise of digging up receipts when the IRS wasn't going to make a nickle on the audit. She got pissed off. I was very cordial, very polite, even as she was raising her voice and threatening to hang up on me.

That's right, she said she was going to terminate the call.

She told me to talk to congress about the audit as this is their fault.

So, congress is having the IRS audit tax returns that will not result in tax increases. What's the fucking point? Are they trying to increase revenues for tax preparers? Trying to help the individual states out by using pointless IRS audits?

That's right, pointless IRS audits. I have all the charity for this guy. I will have him get his expenses and we will fight this thing and we will probably lose and the IRS will get nothing out of him.

When I asked the agent if, going forward, I should not attach donation receipts over $250, as requested, as they are, apparently, ignored, she hung up on me.


The IRS hung up on me. That's fucking wrong. They are supposed to talk nice to us, make us feel more comfortable as they stick their giant, tax dollar sucking cocks in our collective asses.