Most taxpayers don’t intentionally incur tax penalties, but many who are penalized are simply unaware of the penalties or the possible damage they can do to their wallets. As tax season approaches, let’s look at some of the more commonly encountered penalties and how they may be avoided.
Some refer to it as “creative accounting” or just “a little fudging here and there,” but if your tax return is missing some income that should have been reported or includes overstated deductions, regardless of whether you prepared your own return or had it prepared, you are the one who is ultimately responsible. If you get caught, there can be very unpleasant consequences – including substantial monetary penalties and the possibility of jail time for blatant cases.
Generally speaking, tax return mistakes are a lot more common than you probably realize. Taxes are naturally complicated, and the paperwork required to file them properly is often convoluted. This is especially true if you’re filing your taxes yourself — and all of this is in reference to a fairly normal year as far as the IRS is concerned.
The 2018 tax year, however, certainly does not qualify as a “normal year.”
With the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, even seasoned financial professionals are having a hard time digesting all of the changes that they and their clients are now dealing with. All of this is to say that if you’ve just discovered that you’ve made a BIG mistake on your tax return this year, the first thing you should do is stop and take a deep breath. It happens. It’s understandable. There ARE steps that you can take to correct the situation quickly — you just have to keep a few key things in mind.
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You know the old line about the inevitability of death and taxes? It’s still true. What isn’t inevitable, however, is the need to pay penalties to the IRS. It happens, but it doesn’t have to, and the main reason that it does is because taxpayers don’t educate themselves about the rules. When you get hit with an IRS penalty, it adds on to a number that you already wish you didn’t have to pay.
To ensure that you get through tax season without unnecessary costs and aggravation, here’s a list of the tax penalties that the IRS most frequently assesses against taxpayers.
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If you’re one of those who gets worked up over filing your tax return, there are specific steps you can take to help ease the struggle and avoid the most common tax issues that are reported each year.
Here are the top 12 tax issues, broken down into categories for business owners and individual taxpayers, and how everybody can minimize their impact this year.
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Receiving notification from the Internal Revenue Service that there’s some kind of problem is one of the most bone-chilling situations an American taxpayer can experience. Just receiving an envelope with a return address from the IRS can strike fear. There are many different reasons that the IRS might reach out, but some are more common than others.
This has been a tumultuous year for taxes, with the tax reform that passed in late 2017 generally becoming effective in 2018, often with significant changes for both individuals and businesses. This is the first major tax reform legislation in more than 30 years, and to implement it, the IRS will have to create or revise approximately 450 forms, publications and instructions and modify around 140 information technology systems to ensure it can accommodate the newly revised or created tax forms, not to mention writing tax regulations for all of these changes – a daunting task for sure. The following are issues that could affect you and that you may need to plan for.