Response from the Secretary

[David Merrill]

Thank you. I apologize. If you were to study my posts closely you might find me subject to imagination attacks. The manner in which you kept skirting the border between being in contract with the Fed or not led me to be quite suspicious.

That paperwork is quite revealing. One of the suitors was battling on the premise that no such Assessments ever exist - like the one you show in your link. Interesting that you have shown us that. All else, the garbage my suspicions generated - THANK YOU! That is some great fuel for edifying conversation right there.


Regards,

David Merrill.

[ManOntheLand]

Thank you. I apologize. If you were to study my posts closely you might find me subject to imagination attacks. The manner in which you kept skirting the border between being in contract with the Fed or not led me to be quite suspicious.

That paperwork is quite revealing. One of the suitors was battling on the premise that no such Assessments ever exist - like the one you show in your link. Interesting that you have shown us that. All else, the garbage my suspicions generated - THANK YOU! That is some great fuel for edifying conversation right there.


Regards,

David Merrill.

No worries David! I took my post down though once I realized there are unique certified mail numbers and document locator codes still on there. If you think it is important for people to see, I will sanitize it some more and re-post.

Assessments for frivolous penalties do exist, but the IRS does not seem to follow their own assessment rules in the Code--a supervisor is required by the Code to give written authorization to make the frivolous penalty assessment (or it "shall not be assessed") and according to IRM they are required to keep that written authorization in the exam file. My Privacy Act requests turned up no such documents in the file.
Also note that the only narrative information in the 8728 assessment document is "no response to 3176". This is false, because I indeed responded to the 3176 letter. They just ignored my response so they could go ahead and assess the penalty anyway.

Further, the assessments do not typically appear in the Individual Master File transcript. Believe it or not, my IMF for all these years indicate that I owe nothing (with the exception of the 2009, for which they did a summary audit and re-assessed $2477 tax, rather than imposing a frivolous penalty.) They have to create a whole separate transcript from the master file in order to get their computer to accept these frivolous penalty assessments.