IRS Problems, Tax Planning & Accounting in Sugar Land, TX

Start with this: an IRS letter is not an IRS bill, and most of them are narrower than they read. A notice usually says that one figure on one return does not match something the agency holds, and asks you to explain or correct it. That is a very different thing from a demand.

What makes it worse is time. Every one of these has a window, and the options narrow as the window closes, which is why the letter that sat in a drawer for four months is a harder case than the same letter opened in week one.

So the first step is finding out what is actually true. That normally means pulling your IRS transcripts rather than working from the letters you happen to have kept, because those two rarely say the same thing. Once we know what the agency believes and where it disagrees with you, there is a decision to make. Before that, anybody quoting you an outcome is guessing.

Most business owners have only ever bought preparation. A return gets filed, accurately and on time, and that is the whole relationship. It is a real service and it is not the one that changes what you owe.

Preparation reports the year. By the time it happens the arithmetic is fixed, and everything that could have moved it happened months earlier: how the business is structured, how the owner is paid, when income and large purchases landed, what the quarterly estimates were set against.

That work is the Certified Tax Coach designation's whole subject, and it has to happen while the year is still in progress. The practical test is simple. If you only hear from your accountant in filing season, you are buying compliance and not planning.

Nearly every tax problem that arrives here turns out to be a bookkeeping problem wearing a different coat. A return prepared from books nobody reconciled is a guess with a signature on it, and a resolution case built on records that do not tie out is a case built on sand.

So where the books are behind, that gets fixed first, as its own piece of work with its own scope agreed before it starts rather than absorbed into a monthly fee without mention. Behind by a quarter or by three years, it is a normal place to start.

After that the rhythm is deliberately dull. Transactions recorded and categorised, every account matched to its real statement, the month closed on a schedule, and reports written so you can read them without translating them first.

Unpaid payroll tax is not treated like other tax debt. Part of what is owed was withheld from employees' wages, which changes both how seriously the agency treats it and who can end up personally responsible for it: the exposure can reach the individuals who controlled the payments, rather than stopping at the company.

That is the reason payroll sits alongside resolution in this practice instead of being a separate administrative service bought from a separate vendor. An employer who is behind has two problems at once and they have to be worked together.

For employers who are not behind, the job is keeping it that way: processing and direct deposit each period, the filings that follow, the year-end W-2 and 1099 work, and settling the contractor-or-employee question properly during the year rather than discovering it in January.

The practice works in both languages, and in this part of Houston that changes outcomes rather than simply being convenient.

The mistakes we correct most often in family businesses are not carelessness. They come from a conversation that only half happened: a structure explained in technical English, a client nodding because stopping to ask felt worse than proceeding, and a decision made on an assumption nobody checked. Paying family members without running payroll, mixing household and business money, treating a loan as income, or assuming an entity does something it does not.

Every one of those is a misunderstanding, and every one is expensive. Having the conversation in the language someone actually thinks in is what turns a client who is trusting us into a client who understands their own position.

A few of these come up often enough to be worth saying before you call.

We will not tell you what your case settles for on a first conversation, and you should be wary of anyone who does. An Offer in Compromise is possible in specific circumstances and refused in many others, and which one you are in depends on your income, your assets and your filing history.

If your current structure is already the right one, that is a real answer and you will get it, rather than a reason to change something. If your books need a year of catch-up before anything else is worth doing, you will hear that before you commit rather than after. And if a decision made last year cost you money, you will hear that too, because the same decision is usually available again.