The IRS has garnished my refunds every year for the past 10 years, because they inexplicably believe that I owe them almost $50,000 in back taxes from a return filed 2015.
This would imply that I must have made a lot of money in 2015, but no. It was actually by far the brokest year of my entire life. Like, I literally became homeless for part of this year. Like, living outside, HOMELESS homeless. I remember filing my return that year, and my income was well below the poverty line. Everything seemed normal when I submitted it, the tax software didn't find any errors and calculated that I should actually expect a decent refund.
And then something went HORRIBLY WRONG. I never got a refund, and instead got this notice from the IRS that said I owed them $35,000 according to my recently filed return. I checked the return on file to see if maybe I had mistakenly added a few zeros or something, but IT LOOKS NORMAL. I have NO idea what went wrong or where they are getting this huge number. When I call them, they either have no idea about anything, say they're going to transfer me but just put me on hold forever and never pick back up, or they don't take me seriously and assume I'm trying to evade paying taxes or something, and try to set me up with a payment plan. It's seemingly impossible to get them to actually look at my returns and figure out what happened. I can't do it, because everything on my end that I have access to looks okay. This is something that came from their side, that they need to address, and they won't do it because according to them IRS is infallible and if I want to fix this I should get on a payment plan. Like, I'm sorry but I'm not getting put on a payment plan for something I don't owe. If anything, the IRS owes me at this point.
I looked online to see if others had similar problems, but there's not a lot to find and most places that help you with "tax problems" are more geared towards helping you settle legitimate debt, not fix accounting errors at the IRS. I found an article where some people who had experienced erroneous tax liability due to IRS miscalculations were being interviewed. I was very excited to find this article, thinking I might find a solution- but, by the end of the article not a single one of the people had been able to correct the issue and they were all still on the hook for debts they didn't owe, and the conclusion was that apparently, if the IRS makes an error and miscalculates your taxes, it's nearly impossible to fix. W. T. F.
Eventually I kind of just let it go, as I had other things to do in life and was getting nowhere with them. They didn't seem to be aggressively coming after me for it or anything- once in awhile they'll send me a piece of paper in the mail about it, and they steal all of my tax refunds because like an idiot I keep filing them. I usually hit them up once a year after they garnish my refund and I try and get them to fix it, without results. In total they've probably stolen over $10,000 to put towards this mysterious debt that I don't owe. I don't know why I even bother filing anymore. Whatever IRS, at least the record shows I'm doing what I'm supposed to do and paying what I do owe. Unlike the IRS.
I'm starting to become increasingly concerned about this recently though, because they keep slapping penalties on it and now it's getting close to reaching the $50,000 threshold where they start to garnish more than just tax returns, like your income and assets and passport and such. I'm not homeless or broke anymore. I own a successful and growing business, and I really like traveling places. I can deal with them clawing back my tax returns - those always felt like free surprise money anyway - but they are NOT going to interfere with my business assets or prevent me from seeing the world.
But how do I get them to correct this error? Or even acknowledge it? Is there any way they'll ever give me back all of the 10 years' worth of tax return money they've stolen? Has this ever happened to anyone else? Why is what seems like a fairly straightforward issue so hard to fix? Helppp what do I do?
