Maybe it was a notice, maybe a penalty you still cannot follow, maybe only the certainty that it will never explain itself. It will also never ask who prepared the return.
Twenty minutes with Steven Palmieri, no charge and nothing signed. He reads last year's return, looks at where your books stand right now, and tells you what a real plan would have changed and what is still open before this year closes. You will hear whether the figures on the return you already filed can be traced back to anything, which is the only question that matters on the day a notice arrives. You will also hear what a monthly package that includes the tax plan looks like. Elsewhere that plan alone is sold as a $15,000 project. Here it comes with the work, because a plan nobody maintains is only a document.
If you have opened one of those envelopes, you already know the feeling. Here is what is actually happening underneath it, and what the twenty minutes on the call is for.
The IRS does not pick up the phone to talk through a number it does not like. It sends a notice months after the fact, written for its own files, carrying a deadline that started running before you knew the letter existed. By the time you are reading it, the year it is asking about is closed and nothing about that year can be changed.
Your name and your signature are on the return. Whoever typed the numbers in is not the person the notice goes to, and the IRS has no interest in the difference. Whatever a cheap preparer did with your year becomes your problem, addressed to you, with your address on the envelope.
Most of what you hand the IRS was decided during the year, by choices about entity, payroll, timing and what got recorded. If nobody reviewed any of that while you could still act on it, filing season is only paperwork on a bill that was settled months earlier.
Steven Palmieri does, himself. Not a seasonal preparer working through a stack of returns he will never see again. He reads last year's return with you on the call, and on an engagement he reviews the return we prepare before it is signed and sent anywhere. That is the whole point of a second look: one person who knows your file and is still reachable in September.
Nobody can, and be careful with anyone who tells you otherwise. Notices get generated for reasons that have nothing to do with who prepared the return. What is inside your control is whether the return was planned, whether every figure on it traces back to books somebody actually kept, and whether a person reviewed it before it went out. That is the difference between a letter that is a question and a letter that is a crisis.
Bring it to the call. The year the IRS is asking about is closed, so that part of the conversation is about understanding exactly what is being asked and what your file supports. The year you are sitting in right now is the part still open, and it is usually where the money is. We keep the two separate so you stop carrying them as one problem.
You send last year's return ahead of time and give read-only access to the books if you have them. Steven Palmieri reads the return, tells you what a plan would have changed, says whether the books are solid enough to plan from at all, and lists what is still open before December. Nothing is charged and nothing is signed.
No. We do not take IRS collection or debt cases, and we do not represent people in audits or appeals. This is for an owner who is tired of finding out by letter and wants next year's return planned, prepared and reviewed by someone who is still there after filing season ends. The twenty minutes is how you find out whether that is us.