The Tax Man Always Wins

One man’s harrowing tale of accidental tax fraud in absentia.

The first couple of years I did my taxes on my own, I lived in quiet fear that I had somehow made a mistake so huge that the IRS would inevitably find me and take what little I had as payback. Navigating your own taxes is tricky, stressful stuff, if the stories we’ve published about regular people doing their taxes to varying degrees of success are any indication.

The fact that the IRS could make a $70,000 mistake never occurred to me, though perhaps it should have as they are a large bureaucratic entity — the kind of which is often prone to mistakes that have very real consequences.

The Endless Hell of Discovering You Were Found Guilty of Tax Fraud in Absentia

Writing for MEL, Devin Whitlock shares an absolutely terrifying tale of being found guilty of “tax fraud in absentia” and having to reckon with the consequences a decade later. He owed the IRS $70,000 total — a figure that includes both interest and his student loans — for a crime he wasn’t even sure he’d actually committed.

After some finagling, Whitlock managed to separate his student loan debt from that number, but what he was left with was still an insurmountable figure and one that he couldn’t readily pay himself. Tax attorneys he consulted told him that even if the IRS had made a mistake, he would certainly lose any court case he tried and that the easiest thing to do in this situation would be to pay the bill and try and move on.

Hearing that you owe a large sum of money for something you might have done but actally maybe didn’t seems terrible. Your first instinct would be to demand an explanation in order to make sense of how you unwittingly ended up in this spot in the first place. Whitlock tried. He didn’t get very far.

I tried to find out why I was found guilty of tax fraud in the first place. The closest I ever got was the woman who made me aware of the verdict at the very beginning telling me I “must have done something wrong.” Whenever I asked someone else at the IRS, I was told it couldn’t be discussed over the phone, but they could mail me a copy of the transcript. I tried several times to obtain this transcript, using my home and work addresses, but to no avail. I tried to get them to email me a transcript, but still received nothing.

The rest of the story describes a very specific frustration that comes from dealing with organizations like the IRS and occasionally your internet provider, coupled with low-level despair and nausea from owing a massive amount of money that you have to pay back. Whitlock worked three jobs over the course of a year to pay back the money and spent more time wrestling a $458.13 interest check from the IRS that he overpaid.

Read this as a cautionary tale, I guess, but be aware that there’s no real takeaway. If the IRS thinks you did something wrong — even if you didn’t! — you’ll still have to pay them back.

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