What happens if you owe money at the end of an IRS audit? So if you owe money at the end of an IRS audit it's like owing liability on your taxes you can pay. The liability and fault you couldn't work out a payment plan or you can go in collections and work out a resolution generally speaking what happens is the auditor will close the audit that bill will be an issue and if you don't appeal that bill you'll go directly into collections the best thing to do is to speak with the auditor and see if you can negotiate a straight handoff to collections it's not possible in all cases particularly where the liability is small but if you discuss things with the auditor they may be able to shortcut the process into collections and allow you to work out a resolution of the liability this also tends to happen in cases where they're large audit the auditor will pass you off to a revenue officer and you'll start working with that revenue officer immediately to try and collect the liability but neither case if you owe money don't worry there's a lot of things that you can do on the IRS aside to mitigate that liability and to work out terms that you can potentially deal with.