IRS closed – technical difficulties or government shutdown?

Because our elected representatives can’t do their job, the government has shutdown. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is not immune from the shutdown … but you are still responsible to make payments and meet IRS deadlines.

Curious as to how the government shutdown would impact the IRS collection officers I face off against on a daily basis; I started to make my normal phone calls to the IRS today. The IRS practitioner’s line has a pre-recorded message acknowledging that it is closed due to the government shutdown. The standard collections phone number used by the public at large has a pre-recorded message that it is having technical difficulties. I called a small sample of Revenue Officers that I know and got their voice messages (no surprise there). I also called a couple of the duty lines at my local IRS office. The duty lines were not staffed. One had a rather funny message recorded either yesterday or today, acknowledging the government shutdown and then the person recording the message was either yanked off the phone or spat a profanity into the message.

According to the IRS website, they softly acknowledge the government shutdown as follows:

“Due to the current lapse in appropriations, IRS operations are limited. However, the underlying tax law remains in effect, and all taxpayers should continue to meet their tax obligations as normal.”

Individuals and businesses should keep filing their tax returns and making deposits with the IRS, as they are required to do so by law. The IRS will accept and process all tax returns with payments, but will be unable to issue refunds during this time. Taxpayers are urged to file electronically, because most of these returns will be processed automatically.

If you have an upcoming appointment scheduled with the IRS, you should assume that the appointment is cancelled and will be rescheduled. The IRS will also continue to send its scary collection notices; however, correspondences received will not be reviewed (again, not a real surprise announcement).

I suppose what I’m really waiting for is for a prospective client to contact me with a stack of IRS levy notices that were issued at the eleventh hour on September 30, 2013 by an IRS official knowing they were going on a forced holiday for an undetermined amount of time.

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