Several months ago I received a nice little (well not really little and not so nice) letter from the IRS – they were doing a letter audit of my 2006 tax return. They did not like the amount I listed for state taxes (I didn’t either!) and they did not like how much I listed as a deduction for charitable giving. Fortunately, I had copies of everything and was able to send in to them everything they required (and remembering to keep copies of everything I sent). Well, after several months I received a letter stating that I did not owe any more tax.
All the paper work they sent me came 4 times! I received four notices of the letter audit, four letters stating that they were processing the information, and four letters stating that they did not make any changes to my return. Another interesting thing was that the IRS requested that I send them a copy of the tax return that I had originally submitted for the year in question. You definitely need to keep a copy of whatever you submit to the IRS because there is no guarantee they will have it!
I have to admit that until I received confirmation from the IRS I was a little uneasy. Not that I doubted I had filed correctly (and honestly), but just the fact that you are dealing with the IRS is not fun. So thanks to my tax software and my filing system everything was fine. Another good reason to have a good filing system!
