#this is all very helpful
For people with anxiety about filing taxes, here’s what things that happen when you make a mistake on your tax return:
- it gets corrected
- you get a letter in the mail either asking for some additional information or a letter showing the adjustment
- you pay the amount (there’s options for payment plans too!) or get a refund
Things that do nothappen
- you’re “in trouble”
- you are charged with fraud
- you go to jail
I know that most people are probably just joking/exaggerating when they say a mistake on their return means they get thrown in jail but when I worked with the public I always would encounter people who believed that would happen and they would be panicking about it. So I like to put this out there every year because if I can even prevent one person from feeling that way, it’s worth it
Also the IRS will NEVER cold call you. If you get an upsetting phone call about your taxes it is a scam.
Hey, so, I work at the IRS, and this is not just accurate, it actively understates how much the IRS is willing to work with you.
Mistakeshappen, and if you submit a paper return, a tax examiner (like me!) will check over your return to make sure numbers are on the right lines, forms are in the right order, and your return is complete. Sometimes that means we finish filling out forms for you, no joke. As long as you made a good faith effort, we do our best to help you.
We even do our best to help people who aren’t filing in good faith, who are actively and blatantly trying to sneak something illegal by us. They get the same treatment as everyone else: we make sure entries are put on the right lines, we fix what forms we can, and adjust impossible deductions the same way we do with typos, even when it’s really obvious a taxpayer is trying to sneak things by us.
There are very few circumstances where returns are taken out of our hands and routed to the serious, ‘scary’ departments, and believe me it is impossible to commit those kinds of fraud by accident. You have to go down some weird aggressive research rabbit holes to commit the kind of capital-F Fraud the IRS gets in a tizzy over.
Point is, the IRS is nowhere near as scary as you’ve been led to believe it is, and the folks that claim otherwise are either rich enough to have an agenda against the IRS, or they’re vanishingly rare statistical outliers who fell through every crack and redundancy in the system.
As for the calling thing, @k-she-rambles is right, hoooo buddy the IRS will absolutely never ever cold call you, our accounts management people are so backed up that it’s a miracle to get one on the line for taxpayers trying to call in. The only way I know of offhand that you’re getting a legitimate call from the IRS is if you’ve received multiple forms in the mail and replied saying that it’s okay for them to call you.
If you ever receive an alarming text, email or prerecorded message claiming to be from the IRS, that is a scammy scam scam, and you can and should report that via contact methods found at the IRS phishing reporting page here.
