Our Tax Experts & Editorial Team

How a guide gets written

A guide starts with the IRS's own material. Notices, forms, the Internal Revenue Manual, revenue procedures. Where the IRS has not published something, we say so rather than filling the gap with a plausible-sounding answer, because a confident guess about what a notice means is indistinguishable from knowledge until someone acts on it.

Angeline writes. Melissa reads it before anyone else can. That review is looking for a specific set of problems: a procedure described from memory instead of from the source, a dollar figure quoted without the year it belongs to, and any sentence a reader could mistake for a promise about how their case will turn out. Penalty amounts and income thresholds are adjusted for inflation, so a number that was right in one filing season is quietly wrong in the next. Where a figure is tied to a year, we date it.

Guides get revised when the underlying rule changes, and the date at the top of the page moves when they do. If something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than have it sit. The phone number below reaches the same team that writes these pages.

What none of this can do is tell you what will happen in your case. Eligibility for every IRS program turns on your own financial facts, and anyone describing an outcome before they have seen a document is selling something.