Will Form 843 Assessed 2011-2024

Welcome to this installment of clarifying tax situations with attorney and CPA David W. Ames. The subject of this video is what can happen if the government thinks that I committed tax crimes. The short answer to this question is, on top of the tax that you should have paid when you get caught cheating, plus the penalties and interest that attach to that, potentially a 75% fraud penalty. So, if they hit you for $1,000 of additional tax, best-case scenario is you wind up paying $1,750 bucks. You stand the potential risk of criminal prosecution. That's a short answer. The ramifications here go way beyond the simple penalties and interest that you ordinarily face in the standard civil audit. The ramifications are way beyond that. For many of my clients, the concept of having to spend time in federal prison is almost unimaginable to them. The stress and anguish they feel when faced with the potential for criminal prosecution is indescribable. What haunts most of them is the shame, humiliation, and the social ostracization that they assume will be coming their way as they're convicted of a tax crime. Moreover, a lot of my clients have professional licenses. They're attorneys, doctors, CPAs. If they get criminal prosecution on their record, that's it for their license. They're no longer a doctor, they're no longer a CPA, they're no longer a lawyer. And what a lot of my clients find really horrific is that they never realized that the government is going to publicize the fact that they're being criminally prosecuted. That's part of how the system works. They want as much publicity surrounding a prosecution as possible. This is one of the reasons that high-profile stars like movie stars are at high risk for criminal prosecution because the publicity that...