Taxes and Bankruptcy

It surprises most people to learn that income taxes can sometimes be discharged in bankruptcy. It surprises them again to learn how technical the rules are: whether a specific tax year can be discharged depends on the age of the debt, when the return was actually filed, when the IRS assessed the tax, and how those clocks interact with everything else in your case. Get the timing wrong by weeks and a dischargeable debt survives bankruptcy intact.

In a bankruptcy case the roles are complementary: your bankruptcy attorney runs the case, and we supply the tax intelligence that determines what the bankruptcy can do to the tax debt. We pull and analyze your IRS transcripts, compute the timing tests for every year you owe, flag which debts are dischargeable now, which become dischargeable if the filing waits, and which never will be. That analysis frequently changes when a case should be filed, and sometimes whether bankruptcy is the right tool at all.

If bankruptcy is not the answer, the same analysis tells us which IRS resolution is. Either way, you decide with the facts in hand.