Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be reviewing the IRS audit and the different stages in the audit and some details about information you could obtain from IRS during the audit to confirm whether your tax return is correct. So the IRS audit starts with an audit letter that is generally sent to the business owner or taxpayer. That letter will include the revenue agent's name, their telephone number, fax number, the number of days that you have to respond to the revenue agent, and you don't want to shrug off that responsibility. You definitely want to contact them. Even if you need more time, you can basically indicate that you need another 30 or 60 days. Typically, they'll give you 30 days to respond and to have an interview and to meet. You can definitely hire a tax attorney or a CPA. We recommend a tax attorney because any communication you have with your attorney is protected under the attorney-client privilege where it's not protected with any other tax professional or CPA. So after you get the letter, the letter will request you contact the IRS revenue agent within 10 days. They'll set an appointment to provide the information, and here's the stages that occurs after that. The IRS will then typically send you the first correspondence out afterwards will be an IDR. It's an information document request, and this is a list of all the documents and information IRS is requesting from you. If you don't provide that information, IRS can summons the information. For instance, if you don't provide your bank statements, IRS can go to your bank and within 30 days get your bank statements, cancel checks, and deposit items. So after the IDR, after you respond to the IDR, IRS will have another discussion, and if they don't feel that you provided all the information, they'll issue another IDR, typically IDR number two, and it could go up to as many IDRs as they need based upon the number of issues that they're looking on your tax return. After there's been a request for information and you provided documents and information back and typically also IRS will conduct an interview of the taxpayer, we attempt sometimes to have that either interviewed at the very end or just not have it at all, but in some situations it's really not going to be avoidable, and if IRS wanted to interview you and it was an important part of their audit, they could submit a summons, and if you disregard that they can go file an action in federal court to enforce the summons to require you to appear to provide documents and any testimonial information. Really depends on the character of the audit and whether they're going to do that and how important it is to resolving the audit. So after there's been an exchange of information, you'll typically get a revenue agent report. That's the report at the conclusion of the audit. You'll review that report and you'll want to check our other video where we go through the revenue agent report and discuss some tips and tricks and things to look at and how to read the report to understand whether that information is correct, whether the IRS made the correct determination on each item of income and expenses. So you'll have 30 days to respond typically to that revenue agent report. It might be less time, especially if there's been multiple revenue agent reports. And at the conclusion of the audit, you'll then either agree or disagree. And if you disagree, you'll need to file a protest letter or you can go to tax court. My name is John Malkowski. I'm founder of Malkowski Tax Law. I hope this information was useful.