IRS Tax Wizard

IRS liens are filed by IRS at your local courthouse and do not affect your money, but they affect your credit rating; your ability to borrow money; your ability to get a mortgage to buy real estate; your ability to qualify for some types of employment.

If you own real estate that has a $93,000 IRS lien against it and that property has equity and you then sell the property for a profit of, say, $100,000, then the check you receive at the closing of the sale will be the $100,000 profit minus the $93,000 that will be paid to IRS before you get any cash. So you would receive only $7,000. If the lien was for $110,000, then IRS would get the entire $100,000 and you would still owe them $10,000.

IRS does not file tax liens against everyone who owes back taxes. Sometimes liens are filed immediately; often, liens are not filed for years. Liens may not be filed against a taxpayer who owes over $50,000, while a second taxpayer may have a lien for just $7,500.

Some IRS representatives who discover that a taxpayer has no liens on $25,000 in tax debt will make sure that new liens are filed as soon as possible while other IRS representatives will not file liens under the same circumstances.

IRS Lien Filing Policy

In spite of everything you just read, IRS is really very good with their lien policies and procedures.

IRS policy is simple:

A lien is to be filed on each and every taxpayer who owes IRS over $5,000.

A single lien is often filed on multiple years. Rather than filing individual liens on several different years, IRS will usually file a single lien that covers all of the years at one time.

IRS Lien Release Policy

IRS will release a lien under the following circumstances:

When the tax, penalties, and interest on each year that appears on the lien is paid in full. This means that if five years appear on the lien for $10,000 each and one year appears on the lien for $500 and the five years are completely paid off and the one year remains unpaid, then IRS will not release the lien until the one year is paid off.
When the Collection Statute Expiration Date (CSED) for the lien expires (usually ten years after the tax was assessed).
When IRS accepts a bond that you submit, guaranteeing payment of the debt. This option rarely occurs.
Many IRS liens are what they refer to as "self releasing." This means that when the CSED expires, that the lien is automatically released. However, many county courthouses do not process the release and the lien will remain filed until the courthouse lien department actually receives an IRS Lien Release document.

Recommended Method of Lien Release

We recommend that all taxpayers file their own IRS Lien Release documents at the county courthouses where the liens were originally filed. This procedure will guarantee that the release is actually filed and that it will soon be reflected on the taxpayer's credit report.

Features and Benefits

Our IRS Lien Release Service guarantees the timely and proper research and investigation of a taxpayer's IRS lien history.

We research all IRS lien activity, including filing date, year(s) covered, and Collection Statute Expiration Dates (CSED).

If CSEDs have been reached, we contact the proper IRS representatives and instruct them to fax us copies of Lien Releases and also to mail copies of the release document to the appropriate county courthouse where the lien was originally filed.

We then contact the taxpayer and provide copies of all lien release documents with additional instructions.

Our fee for this service is $495 if the lien is successfully released and $295 if not releasable (since we must still invest our time to research the taxpayer's IRS matters and contact IRS personnel).

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