Getting Audited By the IRS Was the Wake-Up Call I Needed
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Dear IRS auditor,
I know you're not expecting this, but thanks. Really. If you hadn’t mistakenly overcharged me in the fall of 2012, I might never have woken up.
I’ll admit it was a huge shock the day I opened the unassuming white envelope containing your “final assessment” to find I owed you $50,000, as opposed to the “few hundred dollars” my accountant had predicted. Then again, I hadn’t spoken to the guy in months, maybe a whole year. That was how I was then: utterly checked out.
At the time, I was grieving the sudden death of my 22-year-old daughter and moving in protracted slow motion. I was so devastated that I’d closed my marketing coaching business and was living on savings in the pastel comfort of a friend’s guest room. Each and every day, I woke up and lay there staring at the ceiling, not sure how, or why, to get out of bed.
You seemed like a nice young woman when I picked up my files from your suburban office, the unmarked white door nearly obscured by a gargantuan American flag hanging limp on a pole. Standing there in jeans and a flannel shirt, you asked, “Do you have any questions?” I was so terrified to be on the IRS’s sterile, fluorescent-lit turf that I couldn’t think clearly. I could barely think at all. But finally, I remembered a couple of critical queries: Had my accountant ever discussed my bill with you? And who’d calculated that my business earned $200,000 more than it actually had?
You were downright empathetic when you said, “We called your accountant, but I’m afraid he never got back to us.” Money had always been an intimidating blur to me, and the IRS a fearsome, shadowy giant. But that day, I decided to go through the appeals entirely on my own.
In the weeks that followed, I slowly assembled page after page of deposit slips, invoices, receipts, and canceled checks, tucking them carefully into a massive three-ring binder. As I did, something shifted in me. The process had shown up like an invitation, requesting I return to the world of thinking adults. And it felt surprisingly good.
When the appeals officer looked over my handiwork months later, he was impressed. “These are Wall Street–quality books,” he noted with a smile. After a few hours, he called to inform me you’d made an error; I owed nothing. Molten relief and pride poured through my limbs—I was awake again, moving forward. Thanks to your mistake, the long, slow slog of grief eased, just a little, allowing me to discover an unexpected truth: I had been through hell, but I was going to be fine.
Suzanne Falter is the writer of How Much Joy Can You Stand?, a blogger, and host of the podcast The Self-Care Soother
This story originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of O.
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