Editorial policy and methodology

This site publishes general information about IRS collection procedure. Its usefulness depends entirely on being accurate, so the rules it is written under are set out here in full rather than summarized.

What we will not claim

The tax resolution industry has a well-earned reputation problem, and most of it comes from a small set of claims. This site is written under explicit prohibitions:

• no statement that a reader qualifies, may qualify, or is likely to qualify for any resolution;
• no claim that a tax debt can be settled for a stated fraction of its value;
• no guarantee of any outcome, and no claim that penalties or a balance will be removed;
• no reference to a government program that claims to forgive tax debts on application, because no such program exists;
• no testimonials, case results, success rates, or client outcomes of any kind;
• no manufactured urgency: no countdowns, no invented deadlines, no claim of limited availability.

These are not stylistic preferences. Whether a resolution path is available to a particular taxpayer is the output of a financial analysis performed on their actual account data against the IRS's own standards. Asserting the result before performing the analysis is not a prediction.

This rule is enforced mechanically as well as editorially. The build runs a claims check over every page, and a page containing prohibited language fails the build rather than being published and corrected later. The check has a test that feeds it known-bad text and requires it to fail — a control that cannot fail is not a control.

Real deadlines are stated; urgency is not manufactured

Some IRS deadlines are real and losing them is permanent. The 30-day Collection Due Process window under Internal Revenue Code § 6330, and the parallel window on a lien filing under § 6320, are described plainly and their consequences are not softened. Equally, notices that carry no deadline are described as carrying no deadline, even where their own wording is alarming. Accuracy runs in both directions.

Sourcing

Every page that makes substantive procedural statements cites primary authority, and the build rejects any such page that does not include at least one source from the Internal Revenue Service, the Internal Revenue Code as published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, the Code of Federal Regulations, or the Treasury.

Sources are listed on each page with the publisher, the type of authority, and the date the citation was last checked against the live document. Links are verified by a separate task that reports dead citations and silent redirects; that task is deliberately not part of the ordinary build, because an IRS outage should not prevent the site from compiling.

Every source cited anywhere on the site is collected in a single index of sources, generated from the pages themselves and showing which pages rely on each document. A claim about how well sourced this site is should be checkable rather than asserted, which is what that page is for.

Statutory constants and administrative figures are treated differently

Some figures are fixed in statute — the ten-year collection period under § 6502, the 30-day hearing windows, the 20% down payment on a lump-sum offer under § 7122(c), the $10,000 guaranteed installment agreement threshold under § 6159(c). These are stated directly.

Others are administrative and the IRS revises them: application fees, user fees, installment agreement thresholds, and allowable living expense standards. This site states those figures too, because a reader asking what an Offer in Compromise costs is owed the number rather than a pointer to where the number lives. Each one is taken from the issuing IRS document, cited to it, carries the date that document was checked, and names the exceptions that apply to it. A figure of this kind is never restated in a second place, so there is one thing to correct when the IRS changes it.

The trade is maintenance, and it is accepted deliberately: a page carrying a revisable figure is reviewed more often than a page that does not. A page that states a current dollar figure with no source, no review date and no named exception should be treated with suspicion — including on other sites.

Authorship

Content is written and maintained by Chapter One Tax Resolution, which takes editorial responsibility for what it publishes. Each page shows the date it was last updated.

This site does not name a practitioner or state anyone's professional designation. It is an information service that takes requests for contact; where a request is passed to an independent tax professional, that professional is not held out here and their credentials are not described. A professional credential may not be inferred or approximated, and the safest way to avoid doing so is not to assert one.

Structured data

Machine-readable markup on this site describes only what is visible on the page. FAQ markup is emitted only where the questions and answers are rendered for readers, and the build verifies that every question and answer string in the markup appears in the page HTML. No review, rating, or organization markup is emitted while the underlying facts are unestablished.

Corrections

Where a page is wrong it is corrected and the review date is updated. Tax procedure changes, and a page that has not been reviewed recently may have been overtaken — which is why the review date is shown on every page rather than a publication date.

Tax procedure changes. Dollar thresholds, user fees, and administrative programs are revised by the IRS from time to time. Each page shows when it was last updated and links to the primary IRS or statutory source so you can confirm the current position yourself.

What this site is not

This website publishes general educational information about IRS collection procedure and the resolution options that exist under federal tax law. It is not a law firm, an accounting firm, or an enrolled agent practice, and it does not provide legal, accounting, or tax advice.

Reading this site does not create a professional-client relationship. General information cannot account for the facts of your IRS account, and nothing here should be treated as advice about what you specifically should do.

No resolution outcome is promised or predicted anywhere on this site. Whether any particular option is available to a taxpayer depends on facts that have to be established by examining that taxpayer’s IRS account and financial circumstances.