WASHINGTON – The Internal Revenue Service today reopened the offshore voluntary disclosure program to help people hiding offshore accounts get current with their taxes and announced the collection of more than $4.4 billion so far from the two previous international programs.
This is the third run of this program and I would anticipant the last so make it count.
Read me here – http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=252162,00.html
Yes, what a nightmare. Following assnigment of a revenue agent in ovdp, I received collection letters from a service center for a couple of the years in my disclosure. No one could stop them(not my attorney nor the revenue agent) and they kept getting more threatening as they came. We finally made payment to the service center for those 2 years to stop the collection process and prevent a tax lien. No one knew what to do to stop the madness even though we were in ovdp and fully cooperating. We had to get agreement from the revenue agent to make adjustments for those 2 years in the final calculations. Even more unbelievable: after the bell rang and we paid the tab the agent presented, a number of weeks later I got a dreaded envelope from IRS. When I opened it it was a check made out to me in the amount of the in lieu of penalty plus interest.Of course I returned the check to the agent after crapping in my pants a few times. A true WTF moment. I called it the boomerang fbar penalty. All this crap along with some other curious occurances cost me a bundle in legal fees. IRS needs to get their act together to say the least. They are such a large and cumbersome organization that the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.