 Internal Baptist Service IRS tax news. All taxpayers should familiarize themselves with the taxpayer bill of rights. Oh, I know you like the old bill of rights, but now we like totally improved it by adding a new word in front of bill of rights, which always makes things better. So now it's called the taxpayer bill of rights. It's kind of like what we did with that old bland boring term. Everybody used to use like way back in the dark ages. No one has justice, which we totally improved by putting a social before. So we now use the term social justice. Social justice makes way more sense. Just kidding. We still have the old bill of rights too. And the term social justice is meaningless fiddle faddle, which is annoying because I like my fiddle faddle to have meaning. I want meaning full fiddle faddle. Dang it. It's the secret to a good life. A belly full of meaningful fiddle faddle. IRS tax dip 2022-102 July 6, 2022 by law. All taxpayers have fundamental rights when they're interacting with the IRS. It's important that all taxpayers know and understand their rights. The taxpayer bill of rights, there's a link to that here, presents these rights in 10 categories. Here's an overview of these rights for full official details about each right. Visit the links below. So there's links to each of these so you could dig into them in more depth. If you so choose the right to be informed. There's a link to that. Taxpayers have the right to know what they need to do to comply with tax laws. Now, when we look at these rights, we probably think, well, of course that's the case. That's because at least intuitively, they're kind of ingrained in us, but you can imagine situations in the past or in other locations where you don't have this kind of information. So obviously, if they don't tell you how to comply with the tax law, if you don't know what to do, you don't even know what hoops to jump over in the bureaucracy, then you can't possibly comply with it. And you can imagine situations where that could be the case. They could say, well, you've committed a crime. How did I commit the crime? I don't even know what I did because I don't know what hurdles I'm supposed to be overcoming or what rules you should have set in place. And obviously, if you're in a circumstance or an environment, for example, where the rules are constantly changing, they're saying, well, we just passed a new law yesterday or we passed a law retroactively and you violated the new law that we passed today that those kind of things could happen if there wasn't a kind of stability. So obviously, to be fair, the taxpayer has to have the right to know what they need to do to comply with the law. You can't put someone in jail without informing them of the steps that they would need to take to comply with paying their taxes. So the right to quality service, taxpayers have the right to receive prompt, courteous and professional assistance when working with the IRS and the freedom to speak to a supervisors about inadequate service. So obviously this is more of a customer service kind of thing. You can quabble over whether or not the service is up to what they want it to be or what it should be. But clearly, you would need to at least go through the bureaucracy of dealing with the IRS to pay the IRS. And for example, in the past, it used to be a little bit more difficult actually just to pay the IRS sometimes because you didn't have all the payment options. You set the check-in, they might apply it to the wrong place and then send the money back, for example, or something like that and then charge you penalties and interest and that kind of stuff. So obviously you need the customer service to a level to be able to facilitate the bureaucratic transactions that need to take place when paying taxes. So the right to pay no more than the correct amount of tax, taxpayers have the right to pay only of the amount of tax legally due including interest and penalties and to have the IRS apply all tax payments properly. So when we're paying our taxes, the law says this is what you need to pay here, the rules under the law. We of course are not required to pay any more than is mandated by basically the law to pay. And oftentimes you'll hear talk about this with regards to things like loopholes. And like if a loophole is actually written in the law and you're saying, well, if something is just simply not fair but it's written in the law, then it's not really a loophole at that point in time. It's just something that people don't think is fair and then you can kind of change the law if you want to change it. Some loopholes might be, for example, things that aren't specific in the law, which you might say is more of a loophole. They say, well, they didn't address this particular thing adequately and people are kind of taking advantage of this particular thing. But again, you would think that precedent would be build on this. Iris would see what's happening, take a position on it and then you can change it legally. So there's of course a difference between paying as little tax that you are required to pay under the law and not paying your taxes, which would be illegal, right? So what you want to do is pay as little as taxes that you can and take any extra money that you have. And if you want to give the extra money to the government because you think that they're an efficient user of the money or they need it for a particular reason that maybe or you can take the money and put it where you choose to put it, which might be charities or something like that, trying to look for the most efficient way to put your money to work. So the right to challenge the IRS's position and be heard, taxpayers have the right to object to a formal IRS actions or proposed actions and provide justification with additional documentation. So if the IRS says, we have kind of a voluntary, we're supposed to be a voluntary kind of system where we tell the IRS, here is our income, here's how much we owe. Now, obviously the IRS more and more these days are looking over our shoulders because they have the documentation because of what has happened over time with regards to the W-2s and the 1099s. So for lower income individuals, the IRS could probably put together the tax return on their side of things without us doing it at all. But the idea is that we're supposed to be voluntarily reporting our income and then giving it to the IRS. Now, if the IRS takes a position and says, well, you owe taxes on this particular thing and then they might change, for example, or give you an audit, you have the right, of course, to argue that position. But obviously when you're arguing the position, you have to argue it within the tax law. So it's not like you can't argue it in terms of, well, that's not fair kind of thing because that's not within the legal terms. The law is what it is. If you think the IRS has taken a position that is outside what the law currently is, then that's the grounds on which you would typically be able to argue back on it. And again, this is one that you would think would be kind of, of course, kind of thing. But if you were in other locations or other times, clearly if the government came in and just said, well, no, you're wrong, pay us more money. And you're like, well, that's not what it says in the law. Even if you deal with other companies or something like that, if you deal with some of the platforms or social platforms and things like that and you make a violation of their social platform term and you're like, I have no idea what I violated here, right? They're not, and you get all frustrated because they've taken some action against you or something like that. Well, obviously, if it's a formal legal, if it's a government entity doing that, then you would hope that there would be a formal recourse process so that you can argue your case under the law. So the right to appeal an IRS decision in an independent forum. Taxpayers are entitled to a fair and impartial administrative appeal of most IRS decisions, including certain penalties. So again, you can have action to basically argue the opinion. So the right to finality. Taxpayers have the right to know the maximum amount of time they have to challenge an IRS position and the maximum amount of time the IRS must audit a particular tax year or collect a tax debt. So we need to know what the timeframe is in terms of when we can act. So usually you've got like a statute of limitations. Now on the IRS side, when could they come back and audit you? They have a statute of limitations too, but it's kind of broader and broader because if they suspect fraud or something like that, then they might have a longer point of time to come back and audit possibly or something. But in any case, the right to privacy. Taxpayers have the right to expect that the IRS inquiry examination or enforcement action will comply with the law and be no more intrusive than necessary. So the IRS of course is supposed to conduct their business in order to collect the taxes in order to get you to comply. So you would think it would not be within the IRS's area to basically be socially shaming people or doing things like that in part of there, but they have enough enforcement mechanisms to be dealing with that. So you would think taxpayers have the right to expect the IRS to inquiry examination, enforcement action will comply with the law and be no more intrusive than necessary. The right to confidentiality. Taxpayers have the right to expect that their tax information will remain confidential. And obviously this is one that becomes more and more controversial as time passes, as information spreads more quickly and political stuff becomes more personal in that kind of stuff. Because obviously your taxes have personal information on it. You can look up a lot of different stuff like social security numbers and that stuff, but also how much do they get to charity? How much income do they earn? And that kind of stuff. Did you report your income? And all of these kind of things can be used to, again, kind of socially shame people that are running for politics or socially, whatever. So obviously that you're forced to give this information, which is personal information, which includes income information, which you're not required to give to anyone else, right? To the government. So you would expect, hopefully, that there should be confidentiality, at least on the government should not be taking your information and giving it, selling it basically. They're not like a social media platform taking your information and selling it to advertisers or whatever. So the right to retain representation. So taxpayers have the right to retain and authorize representative of their choice to represent them in their interactions with the IRS. So if you get in trouble with the IRS, obviously when you prepare your tax return, you might hire a tax professional, but they're helping you to basically prepare it and you're typically the one that's kind of signing it and everything. But like if you get audited when the IRS questions your position, well now it's similar to another different court situations like a criminal kind of situation where you might hire a lawyer to act as your agent to actually go to court in certain situations, possibly without you, to actually make decisions on your behalf acting as an agent. Well, you might have a similar kind of thing with the IRS. If you have IRS actions that are gonna take place, you might hire someone to act as your representative, possibly a lawyer, possibly a CPA enrolled agent or something like that. So the right to fair and just a tax system, taxpayers have the right to expect fairness from the tax system. This includes considering all facts and circumstances that might affect their liabilities, ability to pay or provide information timely. So more information is on publication one, writes as a taxpayer. There's links to all of these here. So if you wanna dig into them in more detail, you can do so and there'll be a link to this in the description.