Attorneys are your third choice to lead your team. Do not follow Shakespeare’s advice when he pontificated kill all the lawyers!
Depending upon how deeply a taxpayer becomes entangled in the audit tax web, the odds are you will need a lawyer to represent you. Common knowledge proclaims the law and its practitioners, lawyers, practice art – not science. To the masses who are taxpayers, the tax law certainly is not hard; it is just confusing.
It will come as a shock to learn the IRS has no attorneys. The Justice Department is the law firm for the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service does not want the burden of being encumbered by lawyers.
American taxpayers are offered many choices when the need for tax legal representation faces them. Turn on your TV or radio, and, in almost no time, up pop ads hawking law firms to save you from financial tax Armageddon. These ads are from what I label “work-out” firms. Their primary client is one that has failed their audit exam. In school when you receive a failing grade your compensation is a letter grade F. For failing the audit exam, the IRS’s compensation is not only taxes, but penalties and interest. Thanks to the audit, the taxpayer has become a financial leper. Financially there is no institution which has a desire to help. Outside the taxpayer’s family, most patriotic Americans are convinced you, your family and business are tax cheats. If you were a child your family would need to tie a piece of meat around your neck just to get the dog to play with you. Magically an ad appears offering salvation. Some of them promise to wipe out up to 85% of what the IRS claims you owe. These ads basically are true. What they do not say is how much it will cost you in their fees to cut a deal with the service. Ponder for a moment the millions they are paying to advertise! In How to Hire a Tax Attorney, our e-book, it is revealed in detail why work-out attorneys are successful. In this article we are focusing on the different kinds of attorneys available to a taxpayer.
Your second choice is the attorney who practices common everyday law. Their label is a “shingle” lawyer or firm. They hang their shingle and take their clients: anyone walking through their door that needs legal advice or representation. In the Jack Lemmon movie, How to Murder Your Wife, one of the characters asks his attorney friend if he knows how to commit murder. The reply was, as he pointed to his law library, certainly it’s all there in the books! A shingle firm can assist you because the details are in the books. The problem is decoding the hundred thousand page tax book. The IRS loves to climb in the ring with a shingle attorney. They employ the rope-a-dope technique of the boxer. In the financial arena, this means empty the taxpayer’s wallet with legal fees he is paying to his lawyer and stretch out the time to arrive at a definitive conclusion. Most shingle attorneys are not skilled in representing a person who is guilty until proven innocent. The IRS takes advantage of this lack of experience.
The last lawyer type is one who is certified as a tax attorney. There are less than 30,000 lawyers who have this designation from the American Bar Association. Three things distinguish these lawyers from the rest. Most practice corporate law that contains more loopholes than a shipload of Froot Loops. Secondly, at first glance they can seem expensive, but in real life they can be your cheapest ticket out of audit hell. And third, most important is the fact the IRS fears anyone practicing law who carries this distinction. On top of the fear, the service and Treasury Department hate each and every one of these lawyers. Benedict Arnold enjoys more approval with the feds working in the tax area than any certified tax attorney.
These are the candidates for your tax team. Now you have a thumbnail sketch of the multitude of players available for you to draft. Your next step is to choose your team! Only then should you choose a leader.
