Do You Owe The IRS More Than $10,000?

[ProfessorGAC]

What is going on with this?

There are SIX different firms advertising on national TV to get people who owe the IRS more than 10 grand partly off the hook.

There are enough people in this boat to for 6 companies to compete on national TV for business? Really?

Here's my problem. Sure there are people who ended up in financial problems for issues they can't control, but what's the percentage of that? Seems to me this group of people is dominated by three groups"
- Teabaggers who hate the government and tried to get away with something. No bargains. Throw them in jail.
- Anarchists who are making a point. Less vitriol from me, but stay off my interstates and never use the internet or 911.
- Tax cheats who got caught. No excuses for cheaters. Send them to jail with the teabaggers.

I don't understand why there are enough people who owe at least 6 months tax to the IRS that it justifies this level of commercial competition.

I just have a bad feeling that these are sharks trolling for cheaters who are looking for a way off the hook.

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. I suspect they are all scams...

they are all over AM radio as well.

snake oil salesmen!

[enlightenment]

2. I think there are also people who just get terminally confused by

the rules - especially people who start a small business solo, and then do well enough to hire a couple of employees. All of a sudden, they are responsible for taxes that they weren't responsible for previously and unless they're really on top of it, it can get out of control pretty quickly.

I don't know if that's a "issue they can't control" - just one that isn't deliberate malfeasance.

[Bonhomme Richard]

3. A lot of small business owners rob Peter to pay Paul.

Make payroll (which they are obligated to do) or pay Uncle Sam so they don't make tax payments. Being optimist they think things will get better in the near future and Whamo...it doesn't and now they are in the hole for thousands.
And yes. They are scams.

[Hoyt]

4. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get in a tax mess. But these firms are scams.

[HiPointDem]

5. lots of small businesses going under recently. maybe that's the reason.

[itsrobert]

6. If a business is losing money and going out of business

How are net losses taxable?

[HiPointDem]

7. i'd guess from past robbing peter to pay paul. or not pay paul. but i just threw out the small

business failures as a possible reason. could be that 5 years on from the recession, more and more people have just maxed out their options -- savings, etc.

[Hoyt]

9. Failure to pay sales tax, payroll tax, personal taxes, etc.

[jmowreader]

8. Penalties and interest can be far higher than back taxes

I've spoken before of my tax-evading former state legislator Phil Hart. This is the guy who wrote a tax-protester book entitled "Constitutional Income: Do You Have Any?" (this book puts forth the debunked tax-protester argument that the folks who wrote the Sixteenth Amendment intended that "income" be what we'd now call "capital gains," hence anyone with no capital gains has no taxable income. This sounds even more stupid than it actually is, but some people seem to like it.), believed his own words over those of the Internal Revenue Code, and stopped paying taxes for quite a few years. (And for extra entertainment, he also went out on the school system's conservancy land, cut down enough trees to build a huge log home without paying anyone for them, and claimed he was allowed to do it because you could do it many years ago. You could also lynch all the horse thieves you could catch many years ago, but now they don't let you do that either.)

Anyway, Phil Hart owes over $500,000 to the IRS. Only $90,000 of that is taxes; the rest is penalties and interest.

[ProfessorGAC]

10. Thanks Folks Some Good Thoughts Here

i lost my internet access about 20 minutes after i posted. A transformer on the other side of the river cooked itself. Didn't take out our power, but damaged the fiberoptics. Lost TV, internet and VoIP phone. Not sure how it's designed, but TV came back in about 20 minutes, but no internet or phone until late last night.

Some thoughts in reply:
I know these outfits are likely scams, but there still has be a big enough market for the scam artists to drop advertising dollars.
I also know penalties are a major factor, and that one can often negotiate those down without the "experts", but you have to be underpaying to get penalized in the first place.
And, i guess the surprising thing to me is that the vast majority of people have enforced withholding. This means that SBO's must have a silly high proportion of people "robbing Peter..." as some of you have said. And that a silly high proportion of them are doing it by skating on the IRS.

I just find all this disproportionate.

[Fumesucker]

11. There are a lot of desperate people these days who have gone into business for lack of a job

I would guess that a great many of those desperate people are indeed robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And the tax code is a bewildering tangled thicket if all you've ever done before is work for someone else and had your taxes withheld.

Not letting everyone off the hook by any means but the lousy economy for the last few years has caused a great deal of damage in ways that aren't immediately obvious.