Taxpayer’s Rights – Guide You The Right Way

In any legal case, as a citizen you’ve some rights. Same way, if you’re filing tax religiously; as a tax payer, you should know your rights. In case, if you don’t know your rights till now, you must be compromising with your IRS tax relief and other benefits provided by the government as well. Foremost right of any taxpayer is to know what exactly the tax rights are.

If you want to know about your tax rights get in touch with IRS as its employees need to explain taxpayer’s rights to person who wants the detail explanation of each right. IRS also abides by some rules, you can know about them as well. In any case, where you feel that an IRS employee was not conversing in courteous manner or was not fairly professional, you’ve a right that you can take up the issue with employee’s supervisor. Sometimes, people do not get satisfied with supervisor’s response. Do you belong to the same category? If yes, then you can write a complaint letter addressing to your area’s IRS director else to the center from where you filed your tax return.

As a taxpayer, you do have a right of privacy and confidentiality. As per the right, IRS cannot disclose any information of yours whether personal or professional. However, you need to check on this as according to law IRS is authorized to use some of your information. While providing your information to an IRS employee, you can ask the reason for which IRS need your information. Majority of people, ask in what ways IRS is going to use their information and in case, if they do not provide the requested information what will be the consequences.

Sometimes, taxpayer cannot pay the tax amount in time due to financial hardship and some collection agencies apply extra charges. However, as per the right of a taxpayer, you are only required to pay amount which is due with IRS only. There is no need to pay any extra amount to anyone. IRS also provides facility of paying the due amount in installments; if you cannot pay the whole amount in one go. In order to pay in installments, you’d need to get in touch with IRS as they have some criteria on which they allow you to pay in installments.

Taxpayer’s rights provide you a facility to represent yourself while filing tax return else a tax professional such as enrolled tax agent, certified public accountant or attorney can represent you in front of IRS. If you’ve got a letter from IRS fro audit you can take someone along with you who have good knowledge about financial matter that can be your friend, relative or a tax professional. One can also record meeting with IRS agent. However, you’d need to write a letter to the IRS ten days before audit that you want to record the meeting.

You can get relief from all penalties and extra charges however; you just need to represent the genuine reason for not paying the tax in time.