We got a personal hassle from the IRS this year, claiming enormous extra taxes, which mostly disappeared when I sent them photocopies of the forms they already had in their possession. I did pay a hundred bucks on a beef about not reporting enough interest (how can you report interest, when banks don't give you 1099s on it?), and then they had the gall to charge me interest. The final bill for the interest on my hundred dollars of back taxes was $5 or so -- but they sent me TWO different letters, one to me and one to Deanne, with the same SSN, billing us for that $5. I photocopied it all and sent it back with my payment, pointing out that they had always dealt with us as joint filers, so I hoped that sending us duplicate bills wasn't an attempt to get us to pay this bill twice.
My overall impression is that the IRS must have hired a slew of new agents, or they've just given marching orders to the existing ones, to screw every last dime out of every taxpayer. That's how we're going to obey for Obama's trillion-dollar blowouts: hassling people for pennies.
