Big Mistake: Filing Your Tax Return Late

What’s Late?

You are allowed to extend your tax return and ﬁle during the period of extension; that’s not a late-ﬁled return. A late-ﬁled return is ﬁled after the last extension has expired. this is what could undesirably cause Three Bad Things to happen.

Three bad things happen when you ﬁle your tax return late.

Bad Thing #1

The IRS notices that you ﬁled late or not at all.

Of course, the “I didn’t ﬁle at all” people receive the IRS’s “come on down and bring your tax records” letter. In general, the meeting with the IRS about non-ﬁled tax returns does not go well.

For the late ﬁlers, the big problem is exposure to an IRS audit. Say you’re in the group that the IRS audits about 3 percent of the time, but you ﬁle your tax return late. Your chances of an IRS audit increase signiﬁcantly, perhaps to 50 percent or higher.

Simply stated, Bad Thing #1 is this: Filing late could increase your odds of catching the attention of the IRS examiner.

Bad Thing #2

When you ﬁle late, you trigger the big 5 percent a month, not to exceed 25 percent of the tax-due penalty.

Here, the Bad News is 5 percent a month. The good news (if you want to call it that) is this penalty maxes out at 25 percent.

Example: You are a year late ﬁling and you owe taxes of $10,000; your penalty is $2,500 and it’s not deductible.

Bad Thing #3

Of course, if you owe the “Failure to File” penalty, you might likely owe the penalty for “Failure to Pay” as well. The Failure-to-Pay penalty equals 0.5 percent a month, not to exceed 25 percent of the tax due.

The penalty for Failure to Pay offsets the penalty for Failure to File such that the 5 percent is the maximum penalty during the ﬁrst ﬁve months when both penalties apply.

But once those ﬁve months are over, the penalty for Failure to Pay continues to apply. Thus, you can owe 47.5 percent of the tax due by not ﬁling and not paying (25 percent plus 0.5 percent for the additional 45 months it takes to get to the maximum failure-to-pay penalty of 25 percent).

The government also pours salt into this wound. You get no tax deductions for the penalties.

Another Bad Thing

If you have to pay taxes and penalties for failure to ﬁle and failure to pay, you also pay interest on both the overdue taxes and the penalties from the original due date of the return.

Escape

If you can show that you had reasonable cause and not willful neglect for ﬁling late, you can avoid the penalties. But this is not so easy.

In Elick, where late ﬁling was one of several issues, the taxpayers failed to show “reasonable cause without willful neglect” when they claimed that their late ﬁling was caused by waiting for a third party to issue a K-1 they needed to complete their tax return.

The court ruled that the Elicks were responsible for timely ﬁling their returns and that passively waiting for third-party information was not a reasonable cause for late ﬁling 1. The court indicated that had the Elicks established that they actively sought the K-1 information or that they were unable to make a reasonable estimate of the tax, it might have ruled differently.

In Lamb, the taxpayers claimed that they relied on their lawyers to prepare and ﬁle the tax return. The court noted that even if this were true, it was not a valid excuse for the Lambs’ not ﬁling on time 2.

What to Do

Foolproof Method: File your tax returns on time and ensure that your taxes are paid in full.

Faint-Hope Method: If you can prove that you exercised ordinary business care and prudence but nevertheless were unable to ﬁle the tax return on time, you might escape the penalty, according to IRS regulations.

Takeaways

Don’t get trapped by missing the ﬁling date. If you can’t pay on time, ﬁle anyway. This stops that ugly 5 percent a month penalty.
Further, by ﬁling on time, you decrease your odds of an IRS audit.
If you do have a valid excuse for not ﬁling on time, ﬁle as soon as you can and plead your case for penalty relief to the IRS.
If you can’t pay on time, consider the IRS installment payment plan.
Key point. Be proactive on this. Don’t let the IRS come to you.

If you need any guidance or assistance with the current Tax Laws pertaining to how to prepare for a Tax Audit or better yet, prevent one from happening while remaining tax compliant, contact us at Morris + D’Angelo. This is our Expertise!

Daniel Morris
Daniel frequently provides Media Content via Workshops, Podcasts, and Printed Articles on topics like Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, Wealth Preservation and Planning, Global Banking, and many other high-level financial topics that serve and demonstrate the Value of our Global Network that should be of interest to those who need Private High-Wealth Services.

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