It’s kind of appropriate that the crisis management post that I had planned was to hit today. You see, I’m a little backed up on my things to do because, well, I had a crisis, of sorts. Following up on weeks (and weeks!) of my children contracting every bug/virus/infection known to man, I got slammed pretty hard yesterday and spent a little time recovering in the Emergency Room.
That means that my post didn’t get up on yesterday, my compilation post for today wasn’t up this morning bright and early. Well, you get the idea.
Here are my two cents on crisis: bad things happen. No matter how organized you are, how fabulous of a planner you are, how many strategies you have to avoid crisis, bad things happen. People will get sick, servers will go down, things will break. And some times, they happen in spades.
Since you can’t stop bad things from happening, how you react to a crisis is important. The same rules apply when it comes to tax.
In the tax world, it’s easy to bury your head in the sand when you miss a filing date or fail to make a payment. This is the worst reaction that you could have.
This is the scoop… When it comes to the IRS, it’s always better to come to them than have them come to you. So when you realize that you have made a mistake on your taxes or failed to file a return, fix the mistake yourself. There’s no magic to it. Just amend your return or file as soon as you can – there are links to returns as far back as 1990 online at irs.gov. If you’re not sure how to file a prior year return, ask your tax professional. Just take that step yourself – you don’t want the IRS to file it for you.
Similarly, if you don’t have the money to pay, don’t make it worse by not filing at all. There are penalties for failing to file and you don’t want to add to your worries. If you can’t make your payments, file timely and then consider an installment plan.
But if you fail to be proactive and the IRS comes for you? It’s still not the end of the world. You can work with a tax professional (I suggest a tax attorney or CPA and not a “service”) to address the issues in your notices from IRS. The worst thing that you can do is to continue to ignore the IRS – if you fail to respond, the IRS can garnish your wages or levy your bank accounts to collect taxes they believe to be due.
Even if you’re at the collections stage, there are options to “fix it” as much as possible.
My point? It’s easy to become overwhelmed when bad things happen. And trust me, bad things will happen. It’s how you respond to those things that makes the difference. Don’t hide from bad news – face it. You’ll be glad that you did.
Great advice. Being proactive can make bad situations better whether it’s taxes or something else entirely. Thanks for this post. Hope you are all feeling better!