How Long Does an IRS Audit Usually Take? Well it depends so the first thing it depends on is it depends on what the IRS is looking at and how technical it is if they think you've unreported income and you submit bank statements showing you didn't and you don't have a situation that suggests that you're using a lot of cash do alternate get in pretty quickly consequently if you were under examination for expenses and the auditor has to dig through a bunch of receipts and reconcile things to make sure that "you're producing income appropriate or for producing expenses appropriately". Then you could be in for a long haul so it varies but the problem that we see the most often is once an auditor gets into an audit they tend to dig and they tend to fish around so ideally the audit process shouldn't last more than meeting your Jimmy the auditor issues a document requests you provide all the information the auditor may have some follow-up information that they need based on that first meeting you produce it in a second meeting and then that really should end.

The line of questioning and you should be able to get down to brass tacks pretty quickly in about two meetings if you're in an audit for six months or a year and you've had multiple meetings on a subject that's a good sign that something is seriously wrong with drawl even more than one meeting in a lot of cases is a sign that something is serious it's either a failure of preparation towards a failure to control the auditor and to get them to focus it on the audit and, so what I would recommend? Is go into the audit having a plan have a very clear path of the way this is gonna go talk to the auditor develop an audit plan and then execute accordingly on that audit plan keep things in line as long as you're producing things and as long as they're accurate you really don't have too much to worry about if you keep the auditor in the line of the plan. It's where the auditor starts to deviate from the plan that things go awry so the goal in any IRS audit is not just to pay as little as possible but it's just shorten the amount of time that you're under examination so audit should move very quickly you should move according to plan and they should be chucking along as quickly as possible or to get them over with as soon as possible.