IRS Correspondence Audit Representation

People send everything they can find, hoping volume will do the work. It does not. The examiner is testing specific items against specific rules, and a thick envelope of unsorted documents is harder to accept than a short organized response that ties each document to the item being questioned.

The other common failure is answering more than was asked. Volunteering information about items not under examination is an invitation to expand the scope, and scope expansion is how a narrow mail audit becomes a broad one.

Non response leads to the IRS disallowing the items and issuing a proposed assessment, followed by a notice of deficiency with a strictly limited window to petition the Tax Court. A lot of people meet the process for the first time at that late stage.

You are entitled to disagree with the outcome and take it to Appeals, and in some circumstances you can request that the examination be conducted face to face instead of by post.