The opinions expressed herein are my personal opinions and in no way represent the US Military.
Since January 2006 I have been calling the IRS and going to their offices trying to get an agreed to payment plan for payroll taxes and federal unemployment taxes that I was not able to pay while The Lazy Susan was open. With interest and fees these had soared to around $28,000 most recently.
Each time I talked to someone on the phone they told me they were unable to assist me due to the amount owed being over their limit. They told me I would either have to go see an agent in an office or just wait for them to contact me. So I went to an office trying to meet with an agent. The clerk looked up my account and then told me because of the amount, no agent would be able to assist me; I would have to wait for one to contact me. The lady went on to tell me that I could file an application for a payment plan and could send payments in the interim.
I took the application and completed it and gathered all the attachments they were requesting. The total packet was close to fifty pages. I also began sending $400 per month. During the past year we were contacted twice by letter requesting updates on our banking records and saying they needed more time to make a decision. I was almost to the point I didn’t think they were ever going to make a decision. That all changed when Amy returned home from her parents last week. On the door was a notice from the IRS telling her to call; in the mailbox was a certified letter saying if we didn’t pay $28,000 or agree to a payment plan within 30 days they would be taking our car and bank accounts.
After playing phone tag for several days, Amy finally set up a meeting with the agent for yesterday at 1:30. I told her to ask them if they could work with me by email or even if they could call my DSN line here in Afghanistan. I told her if they wouldn’t deal with me to do whatever she could to get a payment plan, even if it was much more than what we propose; we would just have to cut what we were paying someone else to get them out of our life. Amy was very optimistic about this meeting and told me that we were going to have the IRS gone after the meeting. She told me to pray about it (and a bunch of other people as well).
During the meeting, and some prior to it, Amy was able to bring up the fact that I’m deployed, we sold the house and everything else we could think of, we only had one old car, had two kids, Amy was in the Army, we didn’t file bankruptcy, and we were working hard to pay everything back. The IRS agent was immediately sympathetic to our situation, although he said regulations did not permit him to negotiate over email with me. He started off by telling Amy he only had authority to collect $12,600 of what he called trust fund debt. He then tells her that we would be able to drop off the radar screen altogether if we can get the trust fund debt down to less than $10,000.
He then tells her that he wants to wait about three weeks to meet again hinting that the purpose is so they can drag it out to give us time to come up with the $2,600. Excited, Amy leaves the office realizing that she has just had the $28,000 turn into $2,600. She then calls one of her friends to tell them the news, the same friend that had prayed with her just before going into the meeting. After hanging up she receives a call back from the IRS.
This time the agent says he has talked to his boss who is a veteran (he wanted to point that out) and they have decided to declare that Maxwell Enterprises, Inc. (the S Corporation I set up for The Lazy Susan) is defunct and that neither her or I will be held personally responsible for its debt. That means our $28,000 debt is now gone.
Even before the meeting I was telling Amy about how it would be impossible to have the IRS forgive that debt. Her response to me was that Jesus has paid a greater debt than this. I told her I know, but I have never heard of the IRS forgiving anything. Dave talks about how he paid the IRS payments for over seven years. Others that have a great deal of experience with the IRS have never heard of IRS debt being forgiven. Wow, God really is bigger than the IRS! I think I really needed to know that today!
