All United States citizens are required to make annual payments to the IRS. Even when they are not required to send in a Tax Return, they do pay taxes every month, even if they only collect a Social Security retirement check. Whether we pay taxes on a day-to-day basis or not, we could get a penalty from the IRS if we don’t do things right.
And there’s no better way to avoid problems than to know about them firsthand. Best of all, the Internal Revenue Service’s own website gives us the information we need to avoid these problems with respect to tax penalties. If we follow the directions, the IRS will not send us a penalty and we will not have to pay any more money in taxes.
Actions for which the IRS can send us a fine
Within all of the actions for which we can get a penalty from the IRS there are four that are very easy to avoid. If we do nothing of what we will see in the list below, we will not have any problems in terms of paying more taxes.
To avoid this situation, we must keep in mind:
- We should not send the Tax Return out of time.
- We must pay the taxes on time and in the correct way.
- We must prepare the documentation well.
- We must not send false or erroneous documentation when preparing the Tax Return for the IRS.
If we make one of the above mistakes, we may have to pay the IRS a penalty. However, we can sometimes avoid these penalties by proving to the Internal Revenue Service that we acted in good faith and that we had a reason for filing late.
Extension of time to send the Tax Return to the IRS
Although the official time to send the Tax Return to the IRS for most citizens ended last April 15th, some citizens were able to request an extension of time. If the Internal Revenue Service agreed to give you more time to send the documentation, you have until the 15th of October to send the Tax Return.
Even so, as we have already mentioned, it is possible to send the Tax Return out of time, but this will cause us to have a penalty to pay. The IRS will send us some kind of penalty if we send our documents after the deadline, although we could avoid the penalty if we prove that we did not act in bad faith.