I have finally completed the first draft of my letter to The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Doug Shulman.
A complete copy is provided below.
See my previous post titled The Tax Lawyer to Petition IRS Commissioner re: Taxpayer Right to Representation for a discussion of what prompted me to write this letter.
I invite any taxpayers or tax professionals who have had similar experiences with IRS officials to give me their comments on the letter and suggestions for improvement.
The IRS’s routine failure to properly honor and respect a taxpayer’s right to representation undermines the very essence of what we as tax do.
Something must be done about it.
Letter to IRS Commissioner RE: IRS Abuse of Taxpayer Right to Counsel
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Scranton Lawyers | The Tax <b>lawyer</b>’s Letter To Irs Commissioner Shulman On Irs Abuse <b>…</b> // Apr 24, 2009 at 3:40 am
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2 Tax Lawyer Gets Response to Letter to Commissioner Re: IRS Disregard of Right to Counsel // Jul 21, 2009 at 1:55 am
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3 IRS Horror Stories // Aug 7, 2009 at 10:19 am
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4 ROBERT KENNY, ESQ // Mar 30, 2011 at 3:02 am
I am the infamous Mr. Kenny who suing the IRS in the third circuit.
Of course, I couldn’t agree more with the practitioner observations on this blog. I found these comments when I did a web search to update my contact info.
Some observations from my experience. First, some or most(?) TIGTA complaints are not investigated by TIGTA at all. There’s a secret ‘rendition” process whereby they are referred back to the IRS – an “ECRA” office Employee Conduct etc.
I believe this circumvents the intent of Congress which decided the IRS should not be investigating itself.
Second there’s recent authority that the secondary offense with which I was charged is not an offense at all. Recently an administrative law judge questioned whether filing late without extensions is an offense at all.
Please see below for questions I think should be put to the IRS hierarchy when they appear around the country.
keep up the good work, all the best:
My journey into the bowels of the IRS bureaucracy continues (previously “License Threatened for Filing TIGTA Complaints”). The controversy has raised some questions that may be of more general interest. On the off chance that some of you may have the opportunity to politely inquire of the IRS, I thought I would share some questions that have gone begging.
Re: TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax administration). Perhaps the most publicized statistic that came out of Congress’s passage of “The Ten Deadly Sins” was that, out of some 800 complaints about IRS misconduct none of them were justified. Now 10 years later we find that some percentage of TIGTA complaints are not investigated by TIGTA at all. Rather TIGTA refers them back to the IRS, sometimes to the very unit of the IRS where the complaint originated. These referrals are apparently still “coded” as TIGTA investigations.
What percentage of TIGTA complaints reported to the Congressional Oversight Committee are actually these IRS referrals?
Congress separated TIGTA from the IRS (it was formerly the IRS Inspection Division) so that its investigations would be more credible. Doesn’t this referral procedure circumvent the intent of Congress?
Re: OPR (IRS Office of Professional Responsibility). The OPR Director was heard to say that OPR would no longer investigate cases that originate with “practitioner compliance checks” i.e. when the audit or collection division checks a practitioner’s filing history. IRS Chief Counsel has advised that such compliance checks are “questionable” under the criminal statutes governing IRS misconduct.
How long have such compliance checks been going on? If a practitioner is targeted for such a compliance check what means of redress are available?
OPR apparently considers late filing of a tax return without an extension to be a punishable offense equivalent to a willful failure to file under Cir. 230. In a recent administrative law decision (Kilduff, Complaint No. 2008-12) OPR counsel admitted there was no judicial support for such an equivalence. The Administrative Law Judge could find no such authority either and ruled that late filing was not an offense. He was however, overruled on appeal by the IRS Chief Counsel’s Office.
If late-filing = failure-to- file, what then is the statute of limitations on such an offense? Does this mean that, if ever in his life, a practitioner has filed late he is subject to prosecution? Is there a limitation as a matter of administrative grace? Is it in writing anywhere?
The same Administrative Law Judge ruled that even if a OPR prosecution originated with a practitioner compliance check, this was not grounds for excluding any evidence. Does OPR not recognize a “tainted evidence rule” as a matter of procedural due process?
Nationally even a partial disbarment procedure is recognized as a quasi-criminal proceeding, requiring for instance, sworn testimony supporting a practitioner misconduct allegation,. On what authority does OPR consider its proceedings quasi-civil?
Has the OPR published its procedures yet?
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