The IRS collection letters are arriving in mailboxes once again. And if you get one, tax professionals say, please, don’t throw it in a drawer and ignore it.
The automated reminder notices resumed in January and are set to go out in the regular mail on a staggered basis over the next several months. More than 3.7 million taxpayers in the IRS automated collection system are expected to receive these reminder notices.
“Taxpayers are urged to first read the notice carefully, then if there are any questions call the number on the notice itself,” said Luis Garcia, a spokesperson for the IRS in Detroit, Michigan.
The IRS is sending out what it calls an “LT38 Notice” to let you know that during the pandemic some collection notices were suspended. This isn’t a letter to inform you of an audit. Instead, the IRS is resuming the reminders and providing an update on your outstanding balance and options to resolve the debt.
The IRS also states that if you paid your balance owed in full within the last 21 days, you can disregard the LT38 you received in the mail.
Many tax filers could be shocked to spot a letter in the mail because the IRS hasn’t been sending out these types of reminders for two years. They most likely received an initial notice that went out well before 2022. But many people might have lost that original paperwork.
And some might find it confusing because the IRS had sent out some automated notices in error back in 2021 and again for some people in 2022.
Typically, the IRS first sends out a CP14 Notice for an unpaid tax balance and then typically sends a series of reminder letters to follow up.
The IRS temporarily stopped mailing reminder notices in February 2022 amidst the havoc triggered after the pandemic-related shutdowns. The IRS had a huge paper backlog to deal with then and needed to devote far more resources to clearing out unprocessed tax returns and correspondence.
The notices that stopped were reminders, which would have normally been issued as a follow up after the initial notice. These notices involved taxpayers who had an outstanding tax bill for tax year 2020 and or 2021.
