I have not filed a tax return in 15 years. I have my own sole prop, so is the IRS aware of my income?

On: April 7, 2019

The IRS is aware of your sole prop.’s income, unless it is an all cash business and does not maintain a bank account. Banks are required to report to the IRS interest payments made on accounts on a regular basis. Any clients that pay for your business’s services or goods for business reasons will report those payments to the IRS of their tax returns as deductible business expenses. Any vendors that sell their services or goods to your business and maintain a bank account of their own with have deposits that can be traced by the IRS back to your business. This last item is not done on a regular basis, but will occur if there is an IRS Audit, either of the vendor or your business. While a business may be done on a cash basis without a bank account in the past or present, should the business expand or otherwise start to do business in the future so that its activities may become visible to the IRS as laid out above, the dangers in any IRS Audit become magnified as the business will not have verifiable income and expenses for the prior cash years, and the IRS will be tempted to “estimate” such numbers. Upon determining you have taxable income, the IRS can file tax returns for you and/or your business. This is called a SFR (Substitute for Returns) filing. This is almost always bad. The IRS does not know your deductible expenses and will your tax return based solely on your pure income with no expenses, treat you single with one exemption and not include any other family member you may be living with. There is a limited 3 year statute of limitations to file over these SFR tax returns and still get any refunds that you may be due. You will not be able to file for an Offer in Compromise if you have outstanding years for which you have not filed an IRS federal tax return. In order to do an OIC, you must be in full compliance with your filing requirements and will have to file back tax returns, including filing “over” SFR returns that the IRS may have filed for you.