Should I Represent Myself in an IRS Audit? Well it depends but not usually first of all the mistake that a lot of taxpayers make is they think that they can handle the audit because they think either a they're smarter than the auditor or B the ears on the return aren't really that severe the problem with that is is a taxpayer who goes into a situation with an auditor unless that taxpayer is a tax attorney or a CPA he's probably not going to have the same level of knowledge about How Audits work as the auditor? So even if the taxpayer is familiar with the law the taxpayer is generally not familiar with the way that audits work and the procedure with that and so the risk is is that even if the tax loss is minimal the taxpayer could potentially put themselves into a damaging situation so for example if you're not really used to changing tires and you get a flat tire on the road yes you could change the tire yourself there is the possibility that you'll do a reasonably good job and change the tire and then everything will be okay but there's also the propensity that you might make a mistake if you believe that there is a mistake on your return and if that mistake is is significant meaning it's over five thousand dollars in tax back to the government then you may want to consider hiring a representative to help you because once you get into a situation where there's an audit and their adjustments are being made then the penalty conversation comes into play and so the more adjustments that are made on the return the more it increases.T

he likelihood that the auditor is going to penalize the taxpayer so a lot of the respondents that we represent because of the circumstances we're not able to make must've much of an adjustment in terms of the tax but where our firm makes the substantial difference is on the penalty portion you know and even in situations where we have taxpayers who under report millions of dollars in income we're able to oftentimes explain that away or to negate criminal penalties or things like that and that's a fairly extreme example but generally speaking in an audit you're at a strategic advantage by hiring a representative who knows what they're doing you're at a strategic advantage because we know what to look for we can help you through the audit process we can help you minimize the pain that you're gonna go through because we know what the auditor will and will not accept so there's monetary savings to that there's also time savings we make the audit process much more efficient we move it along quickly because we we know the the auditors we know How they think we know? How their interactions are with the manager and we can just need to know the process like the back of our hand because we do this in time so a lot of times value to hiring a tax attorney to take you through an honor and in fact you know the way that we do things around here because I'm very business focused we look at this from a cost-benefit perspective and I won't have a tax payer take our firm law as a representative unless we think that there's value to be provided there's no sense in giving us a retainer and us not being able to do anything for you so there needs to be clear value in what we're providing and usually a good representative in an audit situation particularly a field on it if they're coming to your house or coming to your business you definitely want to represent but a good representative is worth his salt rehearsal in a variety of situations so I would discourage taxpayers generally from representing themselves at audits unless the issue is very simple and you think it can be resolved by a quick explanation .