Taxpayers and tax preparers should expect a resumption of automated collection notices from the IRS, Accounting Today reported.
The agency suspended sending CP14 notices—which inform taxpayers that they owe money on unpaid taxes—in February 2022 as it struggled to clear its backlog of unprocessed returns. Earlier this month, IRS Deputy Commissioner for Collection and Operations Support Darren Guillot told an American Bar Association tax conference panel in Washington that certain collection notices paused last year will gradually resume, Thomson Reuters reported.
Guillot estimated that from the “end of May” to early June, approximately 5 to 8 million CP14 notices will be sent to taxpayers during what the IRS refers to as “peak balance due season.”
The IRS recently reported that it had 4.2 million unprocessed tax returns as of May 13, including tax year 2022 returns, 2021 returns that need review of correction, and late-filed prior-year returns.
"The IRS is resuming business as usual now that they're getting a lot of the backlog dealt with," Tom O'Saben, government relations and tax content director at the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP), told Accounting Today. "People should not ignore a notice from the IRS. As the notices get further and further along, you face the possibility of having a levy on a bank account or liens placed against them. The first thing I would advise taxpayers to do, if they can, is to set up an online account with the IRS. It's about a 20-minute process, but then they can see exactly what the IRS is seeing."
O’Saben also offered advice to affected taxpayers.
"If you're going to hire a professional to do it for you, they're going to need you to grant that power of attorney so they can access that same information," he said. "If somebody brings me a letter to my office, for example, my first question is going to be: 'What's the root cause of this?' There may be something that we can possibly contest or file an amended return to address. We have to get more information."