Getting Personal and Getting Really Mad

My husband and I were just audited by the IRS for the one recent year we made a decent amount of money because we sold a piece of real estate while my husband's business went down the tubes. He had a small metal fabrication shop, had a decent unionized work force from an array of nations, but like many small businesses, could not compete against the inexpensive, mass produced stuff that was coming in from China. He couldn't sell the business, just had to close it up, sell the equipment at auction (although he did sell some of it to his former employees), and walk away.

That was 2006.

We got a notice from the IRS that they wanted to see everything about his business that year.

For months now, my husband has been going back and forth between the storage locker where he kept all of the paperwork and his accountant, because we have enough reserves to know that we didn't want to deal directly with the IRS. Tempers would have flown. We hired the accountant who does our tax returns to defend his own work.

After weeks of document productions and meetings, yesterday we received a bill from the IRS for $584! That is the amount of tax and penalty we owe for taking off too much of my husband's car as a business expense.

That's five hundred and eighty four dollars! It will probably cost us close to $5,000 in accounting fees.

So, yes, I'm ranting, because today I read that 13 out of the top 23 banks that have been bailed out by TARP owe hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes. Yes, that's hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes. And they fraudulently signed statements before they received the billions of dollars in bailouts that they were current in their taxes. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not making this up. Read it here.

John Lewis's House Ways & Means oversight subcommittee made the following statement: The Subcommittee looked at the top 23 TARP recipients. We found that thirteen of them owed more than $220 million in unpaid Federal taxes. Two companies owe over $100 million each.

We have fraud, we have fraud, we have fraud. Where is there any accountability?