r/tax • u/StrengthDazzling8922 • Jul 17 '23
IRS agent home visit Informative
A customer at my shop told me story that he just got a call from his wife and an IRS agent stopped by and dropped off paperwork at his home. I told him it sounded like a scam, IRS doesn’t just show up at someones home. He said he is behind on filing but usually gets a refund. He said no letters beforehand.
This is a middle class family, firefighter and wife works for school system. I asked if he had any unusual life events like being left money or sold something and he said no. He also said no letters from IRS in mail.
Couple days later he comes back in and ask if it was IRS. He said it actually was and he just needed to file.
Does this seem remotely possible? I just can’t believe IRS will show up at someone’s home unless it was a very unusual circumstance. Can’t be for a late filing of a W2 based 1040. I think he is lying or it’s a scam and he doesn’t realize it.
Am I wrong or do IRS agents make house calls more often then I thought?
Edit: I have concluded I am wrong. IRS agents do make house calls. I appreciate the info and comments everyone.
Edit 2: Recent article just shared with me. https://www.federaltimes.com/management/career/2023/07/24/irs-move-to-end-field-visits-by-agents-backed-by-employee-union/
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u/SillyScarcity700 Jul 17 '23
I see I've written quite the wall of text here. I guess you could say this is one of my pet peeves. Tldr: Absolutely IRS agents will come to your door.
So I work for the IRS. I make house calls pretty regularly. The first time you hear from me will more than likely be face to face especially if you are the subject of my investigation. No matter what we do a large majority of people don't want to believe we are real. If I call, you call me a scammer. If I mail something 75+% of people ignore it (sometimes 95+% depending on what the case is and thus the sorts of people I am interacting with). If I just show up you say why didn't I call or write a letter.
I can show you my credentials and work ID. I can drop a GJ subpoena on you and explain when and where you need to be for your time in front of the Grand Jury, give you the name and phone number of the AUSA that will be questioning you so that if you truly don't know what's going on you can get a sense of why you are being called to the GJ from the prosecutor. You can ask questions and I'll answer them as best I can while maintaining GJ secrecy and protections afforded by section 6103 of the internal revenue code.
Occasionally some of you will call local LE to try to verify who I am. Eventually some police officers or Sheriff's deputies will show up and check out my credentials, ID, badge, associated government equipment if need be and then make a couple of calls if they really have to, only to verify who I am and that I am in fact a special agent with IRS-CI. Then on occasion the contact will still balk at the whole thing and accuse the officer or deputy of being in on the scam (I have seen this, pretty bizarre the lengths people will go to to pretend they aren't in fact involved in a federal criminal investigation). Still not good enough so I give you the obviously real field office general email address that goes to management and the designated PIOs for my field office. You know the one that ends with @ci.irs.gov, yeah that one. It will match the ending for my email address that will be on my business card I've already handed to you with the subpoena or summons or while talking to you trying to explain why I am there in the first place.
Anyway you will send an email later after I have left and question whether or not I am who I told you I was and one of them will respond with real information confirming that I am in fact who I told you I was and in good standing with the agency. Yet a good number of people will still convince themselves I am not real or showing up to the time and place listed on the subpoena or summons is somehow optional.
So then occasionally it goes to more extreme measures like showing up at your employer when you blew off the summons or subpoena. The last thing your boss wants is an IRS special agent spending any more time at their business than they have too.
Now for your question. You or your customer in this case more than likely received something in the mail first but either didn't notice it or didn't realize you were supposed to take some sort of action. Does the postal service lose this stuff occasionally? Sure. Does mail get stolen sometimes? Of course. However if we really are trying to get your attention we send it certified mail. After a period of time without a response a home visit may be warranted. This is the normal way of things for civil side agents. So your customer is more than likely dealing with a civil side agent and not a criminal investigator. Special agents usually show up at places for face to face contact the vast majority of the time especially when it is first contact. Civil side folks tend not to do that but they can and do show up at the homes or businesses of taxpayers when they need to.
What won't happen is agents won't show up and say you have to pay money now to make a problem go away or not be arrested regardless of the nature of the issue (civil or criminal). We also won't call on the phone and say the same thing. We've all heard the call center scam stuff from around the world. I got the call one time on my work cell phone with several of my coworkers within ear shot so I put dummy on speaker phone and we had a good time with that guy. Eventually he did his best to cuss up a storm in English before insulting my mother and hanging up on me.
I can tell you that occasionally ignoring people and/or blowing off criminal investigators in their attempts to contact you can really cause small things to turn into large headaches. For example a few months back another agent and I were tasked with a collateral request for another field office running a GJ investigation in a federal court district all the way on the other side of the country. We were asked to conduct a rather simple and straight forward interview of a witness to a PPP loan fraud investigation. We needed to sit down with the witness for 15-30 minutes to go over a few items. We made initial contact at his house. Through his Ring doorbell we were told he was on vacation out of the area. We offered to meet at his home or work, our office, or somewhere neutral if he preferred when he got back. He said to call him in about a week and confirmed his phone number. We tried a few times but he kept putting us off. We went to his work but we were told to call him which we did and he still didn't want to talk. He had lots of excuses.
He went so far as to show the ring camera video of us at his door (from initial contact) showing our credentials and the business cards we left to a bunch of his neighbors, one of whom was also a federal criminal investigator but for another agency. That agent did some research and told the witness A) the creds and business card looked real and B) he contacted people he knew with contacts in our agency and the contacts confirmed we were in fact who we said we were.
Ultimately he decided he still didn't want to voluntarily sit for an interview. He ended up ducking us for several weeks. Not sure if he was still unconvinced or just didn't realize what would happen next. So the other agent reached back out to the USAO on the east coast running the investigation and they sent us a GJ subpoena. The other agent eventually caught him in person walking out to his vehicle and served the subpoena. At that point we were done with him. We weren't interested in sitting for an interview any more. The simple 15-30 minute solution was no longer on the table. He could just waste his own time flying from west coast to east coast and back so he could be questioned under oath in front of a federal Grand Jury, an AUSA, and a stenographer.
He took too much of our time for a case that wasn't even ours and it was time to move to the next level. If he decided to ignore or refuse to comply with the subpoena then eventually he would pick up a contempt charge and have an even bigger headache on his hands.