I need to say something nice about someone at the Internal Revenue Service. I should preface this by saying that for the most part the individuals that I have dealt with at the Internal Revenue Service have been professional and helpful. Many have even been friendly. However, I thought that this recent experience was special and so I wanted to give a special shout out to the Stoneham Collections Office for going out of its way to help me and my client.
I have a client whose divorce I did some years ago. At the time, neither he nor his wife were working and the agreement simply said that they would alternate claiming the tax credit for their child. Now my client is working, and I am doing his taxes. He did not claim the child in 2012, but we did claim the child in 2013. Unfortunately, the wife’s address is impounded, and her former attorney is no longer practicing law. We did not know how to get a hold of her. After considerable networking we found her. She was not very cooperative. Finally, she got a new attorney and the new attorney convinced her to sign the form allowing the husband to claim the child. In the meantime, the 2013 taxes were due, and I filed them claiming the child.
This has resulted in a considerable amount of back and forth between myself and the Internal Revenue Service. It is also problematic because different offices in the Internal Revenue Service are involved, and they do not seem to communicate with each other very well. So while I am dealing with one out of state office to try and resolve the tax issue, my client is receiving threatening letters from another out of state office demanding payment. The office that I am working with acknowledges receipt of my material and says that they will review it, eventually.
I recently sent out a series of letters to every Internal Revenue Service office that I could think of that has ever been involved with his file, or might become involved with this file. In the letter I included the whole history of what has transpired and why I think the Internal Revenue Service needs to stop chasing my guy. One of the offices that I wrote to was the Stoneham office. If the Internal Revenue Service were to carry out on its threats to levy and garnish my client, that would probably go through the Stoneham office. Within a couple days of my writing to Stoneham, I received a phone call from the Collections Manager of the Stoneham office. The first thing he said to me was ‘this is not really a collections issue’. When I first heard I was getting a phone call from the Internal Revenue Service in this case, I was excited. However, those words caused me to slump in my chair. The first words out of this person’s mouth were essentially ‘not my job’. His next sentence, however, was more encouraging. He told me that he could feel our pain and that he understood our frustration with this case. He told me that he was going to put a four (4) month hold on the collection file and told me to file an amended return with the form that the ex-wife had signed attached to it and mail it to his attention in Stoneham. He said he would make sure that it would be forwarded to the right person and that it would be taken care of. When he got my letter, he called me; told me he forwarded the paperwork I sent for processing, and that he had put a 120 day hold on the collections file. He even gave me his direct line so that I could call him if there were still a problem in four months.
I am especially thankful to this officer, because not only was he friendly, professional and helpful, as I have found most of the people at the Internal Revenue Service that I have dealt with to be, but he went above and beyond. Simply put, this is not his job. His job is to collect taxes owed. It is not to help resolve disputes. Nevertheless, he has taken it upon himself to feel my pain and fix my client’s problem. And so to you Sir, I say a heartfelt “thank you”.