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Lawyers For Withheld IRS Payroll Taxes
Each year in the United States, more than 1.5 million Americans are notified by the IRS that they have been selected to undergo an audit. For most, this process will be time consuming and annoying, but it will not lead to any serious consequences other than having to pay back taxes and penalties.
However, for a substantial minority of those audited, more serious issues arise. Tax evasion, failure to file and tax fraud are all serious crimes that can land you in jail for long periods. What’s more, failing to adequately comply with tax codes, particularly where deliberate intent to defraud is found, will often end up costing painful amounts of money in fines, fees and penalties. And there are few areas that IRS auditors take more seriously than the deliberate evasion of payroll taxes by businesses.
Because employment taxes pay directly for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, those revenue sources are guarded more closely than any others by the IRS. If you are an employer and have been notified that you are being audited by the IRS on suspicion of evading or otherwise not complying with the withholding requirements for payroll taxes, you need to get in contact with an experienced and competent tax attorney as quickly as possible.
Our attorneys have decades of collective experience handling tax-related cases. We can help you to minimize any eventual penalties, fines and back taxes that you may have to eventually pay. Our lawyers can almost always help our clients to avoid doing jail time. But it is extremely important to get in contact with our law offices as soon as possible. Beginning the audit process without competent legal counsel can quickly prove to be a terrible mistake.
IRS auditors are far more than mere accountants. The IRS has a mandate to maximize tax revenues and to ensure the tax compliance of all U.S. citizens. And the agency needs to do this on a limited budget for a nation of more than 150 million taxpayers and with just 12,000 agents. For this reason, IRS agents are highly trained in forensic accounting, interrogation techniques and investigatory methods. Especially in the case that you have been called into an IRS field office for an in-person interview, this means that it is enormously important to have an experienced lawyer at your side. Failure to have a lawyer present at an IRS interview is little different than allowing a police investigator to interview you without a lawyer present about a serious criminal matter. In fact, in the case of tax evasion, IRS agents have the same power as police. And any potentially criminal tax fraud case is a serious criminal matter, by definition.
We can help negotiate a settlement and keep you out of jail
The good news is that once you have retained the services of our law offices, it is virtually guaranteed that we will be able to negotiate a favorable settlement. Even in the most egregious cases of open and clear-cut payroll tax fraud, our lawyers are almost always able to help our clients avoid any jail time. We have been able to consistently make reasonable settlement arrangements with the IRS that only force our clients to commit to payments that they can realistically afford to make.
While payroll tax fraud cases and tax fraud cases in general are potentially serious criminal matters and the IRS has powers that are roughly as far-reaching as those held by police, the IRS has very different goals than a typical law enforcement agency. Tax evaders rarely pose an immediate threat to public safety. And many cases of tax fraud stem more from poor judgement than willful negligence of the public good.
For this reason, the IRS criminal Investigations Division is chiefly concerned with only two goals. The first is providing a visible deterrent to tax fraud so that Americans will continue complying with the tax code. The second is simply to maximize revenues. The IRS is typically willing to forgo draconian penalties if it means that the taxpayer will be more likely to pay back what they owe.
The result of these realities is that our skilled attorneys can frequently sharply reduce penalties, fines and fees while guaranteeing that our client never sees the inside of a jail cell.