More thoughts on Rachel Porcaro

Ms. Porcaro, the Seattle hairdresser and single parent of two boys who spent a lot of money contesting an IRS audit, has been much on my mind.

By coming forward to share her story, Rachel Porcaro has put a face on the faceless millions of low-income taxpayers who have been audited in the past decade. As I noted before, the IRS feels obligated to audit so many low-income taxpayers with refundable credits because there are very high error rates on their returns, some due to deliberate fraud, and some due to honest errors caused by the complexity of the tax code (all those bed buffaloes in the tax code!)

Of course, when the IRS chooses a return for audit, they can't know for sure, in advance of the audit, whether there are errors on that particular tax return, so inevitably some perfectly compliant, innocent, honest taxpayers are going to be caught up in the audit process, which can cost a lot of time, trouble, anxiety, and money to straighten out.

According to National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, many honest compliant taxpayers just give up and don't even try to defend their position.

Rachel Porcaro provides a glimpse into the burdens that low-income taxpayers determined to prove their compliance may face.

She hired a CPA/attorney tax pro, Dante Driver, to help her with the IRS audit. According to the press coverage, the IRS was initially demanding $16,000 in additional taxes, interest, and penalties for her 2006 and 2007 tax returns. After spending $8,000 in legal/accounting expenses, she managed to get the IRS to agree to a lesser figure of $1,600.

That's a lot of legal fees for a low-income single mom to be spending. Her attorney, Dante Driver, has stated that even the final $1,600 was contestable, but the legal cost of fighting any longer was just not worth it.

Did she have any alternatives?

I've been thinking a lot about the alternatives that face low-income taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro, who are audited at rates much higher than the general public. Her story makes a good case study.

What can a low-income taxpayer in her situation do when faced with an IRS audit and a demand to pay back a very large sum of money, almost as much as she makes in an entire year?

Alternative #1: Get help from her original tax preparer
The Seattle Times reported that H&R Block prepared Ms. Porcaro's original tax returns. The H&R Block website states that it will provide a substantial amount of free assistance and support to any of its customers who are audited. They will also pay for any penalties and interest that resulted from errors made by their preparers. Customers who pay the optional $30 "Peace of Mind" fee are entitled to even more support. An IRS-credentialed Enrolled Agent employed by Block will represent Peace of Mind taxpayers at their audits, and Block will also pay up to $5,000 of additional tax liability assessed by the IRS at such audits.

Hindsight is 20-20, as they say, but in retrospect, it seems that Rachel Porcaro might actually have been at least a little bit better off if she'd opted for the $30 Block "Peace of Mind" plan in 2006 and 2007. (Of course, there is a good deal of fine print on those Block guarantees, and in order to collect the penalties and interest and $5,000 per year in additional tax liability reimbursement, she would have needed to establish that it was Block's errors that created the problem, not her own errors. Arguing with a tax pro about whose error was actually responsible for the additional tax liability could be a tough challenge for typical taxpayers. Also, it should be noted that any amounts reimbursed by Block under their Peace of Mind guarantees would constitute taxable income on her next year's tax return! So, the bottom line for the Peace of Mind guarantee isn't so clear after all.)

In any case, it's understandable that Rachel Porcaro didn't pay the $30 for the Block Peace of Mind program. Back at the time she filed her 2006 and 2007 tax returns, she probably did not realize that low-income taxpayers are audited at rates much higher than the general population.

Alternative #2: Get free help from a Low Income Tax Clinic As a low-income taxpayer, Rachel Porcaro was also entitled to contact a Low Income Tax Clinic (LITC). There are 168 LITC programs located around the country, mostly at law schools. These are private non-profit programs that receive funding from the IRS to assist taxpayers in audits and other IRS legal matters. Taxpayers with incomes up to 250% of the poverty level are eligible for assistance, so Rachel Porcaro would certainly have qualified.

Fortunately, because Rachel Porcaro lives in Seattle, she is close to one of the largest LITC programs in the country, the University of Washington Low Income Tax Clinic. The clinic received a $91,000 IRS grant this year, the largest such grant awarded in the country. The University of Washington Low Income Tax Clinic has also benefited from the generosity of the Gates family as it is located in a modern and well-equipped building named after Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates II, someone who clearly cares a great deal about tax equity.

What are the odds that the University of Washington Low Income Tax Clinic will be able to help a taxpayer like Rachel Porcaro?

Not very good.

According to the Brookings Institution EITC database of IRS statistics, Rachel was just one of out of 154,000 low-income taxpayers in the greater Seattle-Tacoma-Bellingham area served by the clinic who filed a tax return claiming EITC in 2006. Using figures from Nina Olson's 2007 Congressional testimony, we can estimate that 2.5% of those EITC tax returns were selected for audit.

That means that there were 4,000 other low-income working taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro whose returns were audited in the Seattle area last year.

The University of Washington runs the only low-income tax clinic in the greater Seattle area (Seattle-Tacoma-Bellingham metropolitan area). According to their website, "During 2008, the clinic handled 132 cases through the IRS administrative process and 67 cases in the United States Tax Court."

So the University of Washington assisted less than 200 taxpayers in 2008, and surely not all were EITC taxpayers. The clinic director mentions, for example, assisting senior citizens, who also need tax help but who typically would not be included in the EITC statistics since they rarely claim it.

Even if all 200 University of Washington cases had been EITC cases, that means that about 5% of the low-income EITC taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro whose returns were selected for audit last year got free help from the only LITC in greater Seattle.

So where does that leave Rachel Porcaro and the overwhelming majority of the EITC audited taxpayers that the clinic can't serve? Unfortunately, their remaining options are not very good. According to a recent study published National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, the vast majority of low-income taxpayers go to their audits without any legal representation.

Alternative #3: Do-it-yourself approachRachel Porcaro could have tried contesting the audit on her own, but she's a hairdresser, not a tax expert. A hairdresser going into an IRS audit probably feels very much like she's in a David vs. Goliath situation.

Even TaxGirl Kelly Erb, an experienced tax lawyer who used to work for the IRS as an auditor herself, felt "that it was a "completely different feeling"" when she was preparing for her own audit recently.

It is, I must say, a completely different feeling.

For those of you who have never been audited, let me advise that the experience isn’t fun. The requests for information can be somewhat overwhelming – especially for a small business. Our bookkeeper has spent days and days putting together charts and reports. We’ve been printing out ledgers and bank account statements and desperately looking for supporting documentation. It’s all part of the examination process.

If an experienced tax lawyer like Kelly was daunted by her audit, how do you think a hairdresser like Rachel Porcaro would feel? Especially if the IRS is demanding $16,000 in taxes and penalties from someone making $10 per hour cutting hair.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson recently published a study showing that low-income taxpayers who go to an audit without representation are twice as likely to come out of the audit with negative results (i.e., losing their EITC and/or owing additional tax) as those who have legal assistance.

As noted above, Rachel Porcaro wound up hiring a very expensive CPA/attorney and spending $8,000 in fees to contest the IRS audit.

Such professionals are very expensive--and few of them specialize in the kind of tax law that applies to low-income working taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro.

Billing rates for attorney/CPAs can run hundreds of dollars per hour.

According to the press coverage, Rachel Porcaro made $10 per hour cutting hair at SuperCuts.

At that rate, it would take her 800 hours of cutting hair to pay off the legal bills run up during her audit.

Why do low-income taxpayers have IRS targets painted on their backs?

The blogosphere has been reverberating with comments on an article by reporter Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, $10 an hour with 2 kids, IRS pounces. (Tax Prof Paul Caron post here, TaxGirl Kelly Erb here, The Wandering Tax Pro Robert D Flach post here.)

Here are the relevant facts as the Seattle Times reported them in the article:

1) Taxpayer Rachel Porcaro was a 32-year-old single parent.
2) She made $18,992 cutting hair at Supercuts at $10 per hour in 2007.
3) She and her two children, ages 8 and 10, lived with her parents.
4) She paid her parents $400 per month in rent.
5) She claimed Earned Income Credit based on her children.
6) She also claimed her two children as dependents.
7) She was audited by the IRS.

First of all, it's important to note that all facts reported in the article come from Rachel Porcaro, her family, and her tax advisor. The Seattle Times contacted the IRS to get its side of the story, but confidentiality rules prohibit the IRS from commenting on individual taxpayers that it audits.

However, based on the facts reported in the article, I can say that situations like Rachel Porcaro's are very common, and very similar to many taxpayers whose situations are simple enough to qualify to use the free tax preparation services of a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site like the one we operate at Union College.

In fact, even the first level Basic VITA certification tests that my students will take in the first week of January will require them to demonstrate that they understand how to use the IRS-provided resources (Pub 4012 and Pub 17) to prepare an accurate tax return for taxpayers whose circumstances look very much like the article's description of Rachel Porcaro's situation.

The article reports that Rachel wondered why her return had been selected for audit:

"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her. "They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."

"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."

Rachel Porcaro's curiosity is understandable, but the truth is that an individual taxpayer is not entitled to an answer to the question as to why her particular return was selected for audit. In fact, it's entirely possible that even the auditor did not even fully understand exactly why Rachel's particular return had been selected for audit.

Some of the IRS criteria for audit selection are classified, a closely guarded secret limited to a few high-level IRS employees. Rank and file auditors do not know all the details of the audit selection process. The IRS has considerable discretion in how it selects returns for audit. It is under no obligation to reveal why a particular individual's return was selected for audit, just as airport security is not obligated to reveal why it selected a particular airline passenger for a special inspection.

For research purposes, for example, the IRS may have good reason to select some returns entirely at random, in order to get information that will enable it to better target future audits. Alternatively, the IRS may want to select some tax returns entirely at random in order to discourage taxpayers from thinking that they can prevent detection simply by making their returns "look typical." That's the same reason that airport security occasionally chooses an innocent-looking 13-year-old girl or 90-year-old grandmother for a more extensive baggage inspection at the airport.

However, although the IRS won't reveal why it selected any particular individual's return for audit, it does release aggregate statistics showing the percentage of tax returns audited in various categories.

Those statistics show that the IRS audits a lot of taxpayers who look very much like Rachel Porcaro at rates much higher than the general public. The graph shown below demonstrates audit rates for EITC taxpayers at over double the rate of the average taxpayer.

TABLE 4. INDIVIDUAL INCOME AND EITC RETURN COVERAGE RATES (1997-2005)Source: Congressional Testimony National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson March 5, 2007


Rachel Porcaro's tax return was one of 25 million tax returns filed in 2007 claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Using the most recent statistics available on audit odds from the graph above suggests that about 625,000 EITC taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro had their 2007 tax returns selected for audit. Millions of EITC tax returns have been audited over the past decade. An IRS official has stated that only taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 have higher audit odds than EITC taxpayers.

Although we are not entitled to know specifically why Rachel Porcaro's return was selected for audit, American taxpayers are certainly entitled to inquire why EITC returns broadly similar to hers are selected for audit at such relatively high rates.

Rachel Porcaro's circumstances may sound straightforward, but the rules for figuring out whether she can claim her children on her tax return for a variety of benefits (dependent exemptions, child tax credits, additional child tax credits, child care tax credits, earned income tax credits, and Head of Household filing status) are surprisingly complex. I'll be talking about those rules in my posts over the next few days as I help my students prepare for the IRS VITA certification exam.

There is a good deal of evidence to show a very high error rate on simple tax returns that look very much like Rachel Porcaro's tax return. Some of that evidence comes from "Secret Shopper" visits to paid and volunteer tax preparers. Some of that evidence comes from studies of audited tax returns. Even highly credentialled tax preparers such as CPAs, attorneys, and enrolled agents have very high error rates on Earned Income Tax Credit returns. No matter who prepared the tax return, whether it was self-prepared, or prepared by a commercial preparer at a big chain like H&R Block, a volunteer at a VITA site, a small independent tax pro, credentialled or not, the error rates in studies are unacceptably high. I have previously posted about a recently released study that found the following EITC error rates on a random selection of EITC returns:


The error rates shown in the chart above range from 45% to 71%, depending on the type of preparer. The chart shown above is based on a random cross-section sample of 1999 tax returns, there are some methodological concerns, and the error rate has come down since then, but it is still too high. An IRS official recently quoted an estimate of 25% for the error rate on EITC returns.

Some of the errors on EITC are deliberate and intentional fraud, but many are honest mistakes due to the complexity in the tax law, especially the rules for what the IRS calls "Qualifying Children." Those rules are surprisingly complex for children who may live and/or be supported by multiple adults, and, to make matters even more confusing, the rules for claiming Qualifying Children changed significantly as a result of the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004. Ironically, that act was designed to simplify the tax rules by creating the so-called "Uniform Definition of a Qualifying Child (UDOC)." It turns out those rules aren't as "uniform" as the U in UDOC suggests, creating the potential for continuing confusion.

IRS audit statistics also show a good deal of underreporting of Adjusted Gross Income on EITC tax returns. Again, some of that underreporting may be deliberate fraud and some may be honest misunderstanding about the types of income that need to be reported on a tax return (e.g., Social Security benefits) and the types of income that do NOT need to be reported on a tax return (e.g., Supplemental Security benefits).

Whether it's fraud or honest error, the IRS is obligated to audit tax returns to enforce the tax laws. As Rachel Porcaro's situation demonstrates, enforcement actions can create a lot of confusion, stress, and expense for vulnerable taxpayers.

Congress could do a lot to simplify the tax code to reduce the burden of enforcement on taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro. Part of the reason that low-income taxpayers have targets painted on their backs is that Congress has made the tax law so complicated by putting so many bed buffaloes in the tax code.

I'll have more posts on this topic in the coming days.

Thanks to Ms. Porcaro for coming forward and putting a face on millions of taxpayers who have been audited for EITC returns in the past decade. She paid hundreds of dollars to H&R Block to prepare her tax return, but statistics show that there is still a significant likelihood of error on her tax return. She spent thousands of dollars and a lot of hours and anguish trying to establish her rights to claim her own children on her tax return.

The difficulties Rachel Porcaro faced are part of the reason why I so strongly stress the need for scrupulously careful tax return preparation at our VITA site. Every tax return prepared at our VITA site is prepared by an IRS certified volunteer, double-checked by a second IRS certified volunteer, reviewed again by the original volunteer who walks the taxpayer line by line through her tax return, and then triple-checked by me prior to submitting the e-file tax return for processing. All of this takes a good deal of time, but we feel strongly about preparing accurate tax returns for our taxpayers. We want to secure all tax benefits to which they are legally entitled, but we do not want to create any problems down the road if and when their returns are selected for audit.

More information on Rachel Porcaro in Seattle

ABC has now picked up the story and provides additional information.

Porcaro, who said she receives no child support payments and owns neither a home nor a car, says there's a good reason she can afford to support her two sons -- she lives with her parents and pays just $400 in rent for a basement apartment in their Seattle home.

"Without my parents' help, my kids wouldn't be in such a healthy environment," she told ABCNews.com. "I can afford to put decent clothes on their backs and food on the table."

But that explanation didn't help Porcaro's case, which was first reported by The Seattle Times. The IRS, Driver and Porcaro said, argued that Porcaro shouldn't qualify for the earned income tax credit (EITC), a tax credit for the country's working poor.

The credit has been often criticized as being a frequent target for fraud. In a recent Government Accontability Office report, the government described EITC fraud as an "evolving challenge." In the 2009 fiscal year, the IRS collected $3.2 billion through audits related to the earned income tax credit, according to the GAO.

Porcaro said she doesn't object to the IRS's efforts to hold such audits. But what she doesn't understand is why hers had to take so long.

During that time, Porcaro said, an IRS auditor demanded to see more than just bank records and receipts -- she wanted her children's birth certificates, social security cards, custody records and proof that they lived with her.

Porcaro prevailed in August, when the two sides agreed that she would pay just $1,600 to the IRS instead of $16,000.

Driver said that Porcaro could have fought that $1,600 debt too -- a charge the agency levied because it alleged Porcaro wrongly filed as head of household on her taxes and should not have claimed tax deductions for supporting her sons. But the time and money it would have cost to keep the battle going, Driver said, wasn't worth it.

Based on the facts provided in the Seattle Times and ABC News articles, it sounds to me as though $1,600 is higher than any amount she might conceivably have owed if the only issue was incorrectly claiming Head of Household filing status in 2006 and 2007, but I can certainly understand why she might have chosen to give up and concede, given the cost of fighting it any further. (In fact, when I used 2006 and 2007 professional tax software to estimate her tax bills for those year, based on the information given in the articles, two children and $18,992 in earned income, it turned out that Head of Household vs. Single filing status made no difference for that particular level of income in those years. Just the filing status from Head of Household to Single would not have changed the bottom line of her tax returns at all in those years, unless there are other issues not discussed in the press coverage. )

Dante Driver, the tax pro Rachel engaged to help with her audit sounds very highly qualified based on this website, as he is both a CPA and a tax attorney, with many years of experience. However, few taxpayers in Rachel's situation are able to afford such expensive representation. Also, most high-powered CPA/tax attorneys do not specialize in the kind of tax law issues that apply to low-income single parents.

A couple of important notes: taxpayers like Rachel Porcaro are entitled to the free legal representation services of the Low Income Taxpayer Clinics located all over the country. There is one in Seattle at the University of Washington. Most are staffed by law students supervised by law professors who specialize in tax law applicable to low-income taxpayers.

I'm sure that the Office of National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson would also like to hear from Rachel as well. Nina Olson is a tax attorney who once ran a low-income tax clinic herself. In fact, thanks to Nina's leadership efforts, the number of low income clinics in the country have grown tenfold.

Comment from Rachel Porcaro's attorney?

A poster with the screen name of "Essayons" (which is French for "Let's try") posted the following comment on my last post about Rachel Porcaro, the Seattle hairdresser who had so much expense and trouble dealing with an IRS audit.

Based on the language in comment, it appears that Essayons may be Rachel Porcaro's attorney. He makes some interesting additional observations.

Rachel tried to get help from Block first, but they refused to help. Anyone relying on Block's "Peace of Mind" product should read the contract very carefully. IMO it protects Block as much as or more than the taxpayer.

Rachel was going to go the DIY route, but her father strongly advised her not to go to her audit alone. IMO that was very good advice.

The reasons the fees were so high is the IRS applied the "support test" under Section 152(c)(1)(D) to the EIC in two of the three Notices of Deficiency. Although Code Section 32(c)(3)(A) specifically excludes the support test for purposes of the EIC, it took two separate written Requests for Appeal, many telephone calls, emails and letters and five months to get the IRS to change their position. Since the IRS position was not substantially justified, we also prepared a written request for costs under Code Section 7430.

Most taxpayers and many tax "professionals" would not have recognized the IRS's error. I believe most low income taxpayers would have (1) paid, (2) gone bankrupt, or (3) been driven permanently out of compliance. However, if Rachel or another tax pro had recognized the IRS's error, they might be able to get the required help from the Taxpayer Advocate or a low income tax assistance program.

If we can't recover fees from the IRS undere Section 7430, we will have to write off the vast majority of our fees.

Thanks for the interesting comments. I hope you will keep us posted on how the attempts to recover fees come out.

Your mention of the possibility that the fees may have to be written off reminds me that there are some attorneys in private practice (in addition to law students who take on such cases under supervision in Low Income Tax Clinics) who do volunteer their time pro bono to represent low-income taxpayers at no cost, or very low cost.

I enthusiastically applaud such pro bono efforts and so does the National Taxpayer Advocate:

Much ado about $68? For some taxpayers, it will be a lot more

I've already posted a fair amount about our New York State audit, and I'll be posting more.

I'm still working on redacting all the sensitive personal information such as SSNs, PINs, taxable income, and so on from our audit notice, but I'll be posting it soon, along with more comments.

It's reasonable for readers to wonder if I'm making too big a fuss over $68 plus $18 interest, but my guess is that notices like this have gone out to taxpayers all over the state.

All this posting is not really about me--it's about the insights into the audit process I hope to get for other taxpayers who may have far more at stake, and who may have far less resources to deal with tax challenges.

Many of those taxpayers are likely low-income taxpayers, for whom an audit notice like the one my husband and I received will present far more difficulties than it does for our family, for the following reasons:

1) Due to all the credits associated with dependent children for low-income taxpayers, they likely stand to lose a lot more than $68 if their right to claim a dependent is challenged. A low-income taxpayer who loses the right to claim a dependent on her federal and/or state return could lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars in credits, especially if multiple years or dependents are at issue on both federal and state returns. In the case of Rachel Porcaro in Seattle, the newspaper reports indicate that the IRS attempted to assess $16,000 in an audit challenging her right to claim her two sons in 2006 and 2007.

2) Even $68 (plus interest accumulating at 8%) is far more of a burden for low income families than it would be for ours.

3) Many low-income taxpayers might have a far more difficult time fighting off a tax department challenge to a dependent claimed on their 2006 return than we will likely have, for a variety of reasons:

a) We are your classic "Leave it to Beaver" sitcom family. My husband and I have been married for 30 years, our children have lived with us continuously since they were born, and there's absolutely nobody else in the world who could conceivably preempt our right to claim our two daughters on our 2006 tax return. Our dependent daughters' only absences from living with us have been clearcut cases such as college attendance, summer camps, etc. where the tax rules clearly and explicitly state that the absences are deemed to be "temporary" and therefore irrelevant for tax purposes.

b) We have continuously lived in the same home with the same mailing address for two decades. We have a great postal carrier and a secure mail slot. We live in a low-crime area with an excellent police force. We have a reasonable degree of confidence that mailings of tax notices will arrive promptly, and we don't worry about mailbox burglaries or vandalism.

c) We have plenty of secure filing space in our home in which to archive our tax records and other family documents which could be relevant to proving our right to claim our daughters on our return. We pay for most things that we buy by credit card or check, so it's straightforward to document who is providing support.

d) We are well educated, highly numerate and highly literate in our native language of English (and I consider myself to be bilingual with a fair degree of fluency in my second language of "tax-speak" as well!) I am exceptionally well-versed in the rules for claiming dependents on federal and New York returns, since that's a major issue that comes up hundreds of times each year at the VITA site I supervise. We have easy high-speed Internet access which makes it easy to retrieve archived copies of 2006 New York State tax instructions on our home computer to check whether the rules for claiming dependents might have been different a few years ago.

e) Our home phone is a landline with unlimited calling time each month. We don't have to worry about burning up expensive cellphone minutes if we are put on hold for long stretches trying to get through to tax department employees who can answer our questions.

f) If necessary, we have the funds to hire credentialed professionals with the expertise to deal with audits that threaten to become expensive, and we have the expertise to feel reasonably confident in our ability to select a competent professional who will do a good job for us at an affordable cost.

By contrast, many low-income families have far more complicated family structures where it can be much harder to document a bulletproof case as to which adult relative is entitled to claim a given dependent.

Low-income taxpayers and their children often need to move a lot, due to financial and other difficulties, which makes it hard to document a child's residence three years later. (If a tax authority claimed that our daughters didn't live with us in 2006, it would be easy for us to find neighbors who could serve as witnesses to that fact, because we live in a very stable neighborhood with little turnover and we ourselves have not moved.)

Low income taxpayers may find themselves squeezing into small spaces with relatives which may not have room for all their children, let alone room for storing great volumes of tax records. Due to space constraints or parental problems with health or other difficulties such as incarceration, substance abuse or domestic violence, some dependent children may bounce about a good deal from home to home of different relatives, and it may not always be clearcut whether a stay with a given relative is "temporary" or not.

The homes and mailboxes of low-income taxpayers are often less secure and subject to vandalism. Their mail may not reach them reliably or punctually.

Many low income taxpayers are "unbanked" or "underbanked," and therefore pay for most of their purchases in cash, which could make it very challenging to document support three years after the fact.

Some low income taxpayers do not have a lot of education, some have limited numeracy or literacy, some have cognitive disabilities (ranging from learning disabilities to mild dementia), some may not be native English-speakers, and indeed many taxpayers at all income levels are quite understandably not fluent in "tax-speak."

The tax code simply doesn't use the English language the way you or I do. Depending upon a variety of circumstances, your son or daughter may or may not be "your qualifying child," "your qualifying relative," or "your qualifying person" for a variety of different tax benefits, each of which may have slightly different definitions, despite the so-called "Uniform Definition of a Child." In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of tax-speak, "your child, in tax-speak doesn't mean the same as "your child" in everyday English. In tax-speak, "married" doesn't necessarily mean the same as "married" in everyday English.

It's no wonder that the National Taxpayer Advocate says that many low-income people just throw up their hands and don't even attempt to challenge the government's assertion that additional taxes are due.