Not scorpions, not reptiles, not hairy poisonous spiders, not jackals, not piranhas, not hyenas.

And while some taxpayers may swear that the IRS agent they talked to was worse than the mythical Leroy Brown (that is, “meaner than a junkyard dog” and who was “bad, Bad!”

fourteen years before Michael Jackson was “Bad”), experience suggests (and were a study conducted, empirical evidence, I believe, would support) that the people who work for the IRS are human, all too human.

The significance of this to a taxpayer in a jam is that if some IRS (or corresponding state taxing authority) staffer has been trying for months or years to collect a back tax debt, or just get the taxpayer to file one or more missing returns*, that salaried government employee just might develop an all-too-human negative impression of the taxpayer.

(*If you find a tax advisor who says you don’t have to file a return, hang on to your wallet, and run, don’t walk, to someone else!)

The Taxman’s Human? What’s the Downside?

Even if the taxpayer has one or one-hundred-and-one unassailable reasons to explain how it is that he or she wound up in this situation with IRS agents giving chase, and it all makes sense, the all-too-human IRS employee might form a decidedly negative impression which can affect how that employee might treat the taxpayer.

The IRS agent might become convinced that the taxpayer is trying to pull a fast one of some sort, or is lying, or cheating, or some combination of these or other bad things, and so treat the taxpayer based on these underlying impressions.

This has happened: for example, over the telephone one sunny afternoon, a New York State Department of Tax staffer snarled at me something like “Ms. Smith [the taxpayer] has had the unauthorized use of $40,000 of New York State’s money for the past five years, and I’m going to come get it.”

This Tax Department agent was ready to start freezing and seizing bank accounts, garnishing wages, using the Tax Department’s enormous power to reach in and grab whatever he could find, wherever he could find it. And, man, was he angry; angry at the taxpayer.

A powerful and common impression is that the IRS and, often-times even worse, the state taxing authorities, have auditors, collectors, and other staff who are all Terminator-like in their robotic, inexhaustible relentlessness, toughness, and harshness.

Ah Taxman! Ah Humanity!

Yet the humanity, fallibility, and frailty of those seemingly Terminator-like IRS employees are often contributing factors to their relentlessness and toughness.

This is one reason (there are several) to have a professional representative handle the case and speak to the IRS for the taxpayer, rather than have do it himself, or herself.

The old saying, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client” may apply here, to taxpayers who decide to represent themselves, on those difficult occasions when they get tangled up with the IRS.

Another example: an IRS agent complained to me about another taxpayer, saying that she, the IRS agent, did not “like” the taxpayer.

More than “not liking” the taxpayer, the IRS agent said she thought the taxpayer “cheats,” or, if not “cheating,” then something must be very wrong with the taxpayer’s business or her record keeping, or both.

This statement of deep distrust, suspicion, frustration and indeed, anger, was made to me, the taxpayer’s lawyer, at a meeting where the taxpayer was not present.

Despite these powerfully negative impressions of the taxpayer, this IRS agent ultimately reduced the taxpayer’s tax bill. She reduced the tax bill because evidence I presented which the taxpayer gave me, strongly supported the reduction.

Plus, because the taxpayer herself wasn’t present at this conference, she was not there to remind this all-to-human IRS staffer how much the IRS staffer had grown to distrust and resent the taxpayer.

Instead, with the taxpayer represented by counsel,  the IRS staffer was more able to focus on the evidence supporting the taxpayer’s case rather than getting caught up in the all-too-human emotions of anger, distrust, resentment and frustration.

Every time this IRS agent did stray from the issues, though, and started thinking about the taxpayer, the agent just saw red – and one thing you generally don’t want is to wave the equivalent of a red cape when the IRS is snarling angry-bull-style, in an all-too-human bull-snarl (do bulls snarl?).

*          *          *

People, businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and regular salried employees all too often get into trouble with the IRS by making mistakes they didn’t even know were mistakes — find out how to avoid problem-creating tax mistakes with my free report, 7 Big Mistakes Taxpayers Make and How to Avoid Them, by clicking here, now.

I have the good fortune of having professional friends and colleagues around the country who have law practices or accounting practices which specialize in defending taxpayers whom the IRS claims owe back taxes.

And so, when some thorny issue comes up I might talk to a brother or sister tax pro in Florida or Texas or New Hampshire or Washington State or a smattering of other places around the country, in both red and blue states.

Recently, I was working on a tricky issue relating the Trust Fund Recovery Penalty (to the uninitiated, this weird string of four words refers to one aspect of tax law that properly strikes fear into the hearts of business owners with employees everywhere or, if it doesn’t, either it should or the business owner has already dealt with the issue and taken steps to avoid or solve this problem; see, for example, http://lifelawandtaxes.com/not-just-for-bernie-madoff-or-king-tut-business-owners-build-devastating-pyramids-of-withholding-tax-debt-deducted-from-paychecks-but-not-sent-to-irs/).

After brainstorming a bit on strategy for my Trust Fund Issue, my colleague and I started talking about life, the world, and business, generally.

She complained bitterly (and hilariously) about our still-new president Obama (I couldn’t disagree with her more on this, yet we still are able to find common ground elsewhere and get along just fine – like the Jets and the Sharks go bowling together).

Then, to my surprise, she told me that she is doing less and less tax work.

Honest Analysis Loses Out to Empty Promises

Her explanation: We can’t compete with these tax resolution companies who promise the sun, moon and stars in their advertising and then have telephone sales people who don’t know anything about the tax rules and say whatever the taxpayers want to hear.

She gave an example: I talked to a taxpayer, he makes $200,000 a year, owes $40,000 in tax, interest and penalty, has a federal tax lien filed against him. Owns a house, has a lot of equity in it, she said. Now, she continued, “you know and I know that this taxpayer’s income and assets are big enough that settling for ‘pennies on the dollar’ just cannot happen.”

She added, “I told this taxpayer what was possible, what was likely, and what was not possible. Then, he spoke to one of these telephone sales people who told him, ‘oh, no problem, we can settle this $40,000 debt for $1,000 and get the lien released in 30 days.’”

Sophisticated Analysis: “Not Gonna Happen”

Her sophisticated (and correct, I think) legal analysis of the salesperson’s promise: Not gonna happen. No way.

Despite the reality here, she said, the telephone sales people told a tale that sounded so good the taxpayer could not resist, and so, instead of hiring her, he signed up with the telephone sales person’s company.

She said, this keeps happening again and again.

Tax Problem Gets Worse

She added: And then what happens is these taxpayers who talk to me, but then go with these pie-in-the-sky moon-promising companies, come back to me a year later.

Now, they want to hire me! Now! A year later. The problem isn’t solved. They still owe tax. It wasn’t settled for pennies on a dollar, despite the sweet story of the telephone salesperson sold a year earlier.

Plus, the lien was not released. And in fact, now they owe a lot more because a year has gone by, with interest and penalties accruing.

And, icing on the cake, they don’t have any money left to pay my fee.

So, what am I supposed to do, now represent them for nothing to clean up the mess that an unscrupulous company made worse by first making bogus false promises and then failing to do anything?

Finally, she asked, where is OPR (That’s IRS’s Office of Professional Responsibility)?

Who knows.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are getting fleeced day after day by unscrupulous companies promising too-good-to-be-true solutions that are driving honest professionals who give honest analyses based on their best understanding of the facts and the real rules right out of the business.