Brotman Law 
Every tax season, many fear the tax return preparation process. Preparing and filing your taxes can be complicated and costly; not to mention the impending fear of owing money to the government. Tax season should not be this stressful though. With a little advanced planning and by following a few simple tips, you can make tax season painless as possible. Here’s how to make it through your annual filing obligation and save yourself both time and money.
Although a favorite saying of IRS revenue officers is that “The IRS is not a bank” and the Service does take collection of taxes owed seriously, the IRS is prevented from collecting assets that a person needs to survive and meet their basic living requirements. The IRS calls these “Allowable Living Expenses” and they are excluded from the calculation that collection agents use to determine a taxpayer’s reasonable collection potential. Keep in mind that regardless of the size of the liability, whether one thousand or one million dollars, the IRS will always allow the taxpayer to keep enough cash to pay for their allowable living expenses.
When you owe a balance due to the IRS and fail to resolve that balance in a timely manner through one of the approved resolution methods, the IRS takes increasing stern action to try and force compliance on your part. One of these avenues is though an IRS bank levy. An IRS levy is defined as “a legal seizure of your property to satisfy a tax debt.”[1] In the case of an IRS bank levy, the IRS takes money from your checking or savings account in order to satisfy your outstanding tax liability. Although the IRS is required to send notice of its intent to levy under statute, it usually does not tell you when it plans to seize money out of your checking account. Sometimes this puts taxpayers in a precarious position because they count on funds being in these accounts that are no longer available due to the IRS levy.
Introduction To Choosing A Tax Return Preparer
