Joy Ahn is an enrolled agent, a federally-authorized tax practitioner with technical expertise in the field of taxation and empowered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to represent taxpayers before all administrative levels of the IRS for audits, collections, and appeals.

I first met John (not his real name) with his partner, Jim (not the real name), in the summer of 2017 at his office. John and Jim formed a partnership for their house flip business. John owned multiple business entities then. They wanted to discuss how to set up their books and tax implications for a newly formed company. John didn’t talk about any tax problems or IRS issues that John had. He never mentioned it to me. I prepared Jim’s tax returns and thought it strange because John wanted me to do all their tax matters. Later, Jim said early April, an IRS agent (I think he was a Revenue Officer) came to the office without notice and took 17 boxes of documents from John’s office. Therefore, he had nothing to prepare for his 2016 tax returns. That was the beginning of the IRS investigation, and later I heard that the IRS criminal investigation division put him on ankle monitors. Since the IRS criminal investigation started, I didn’t see him after that. He hired a lawyer, and the first court date was scheduled and rescheduled. One day out of the blue, Jim called me and said, “Can you guess what I heard?” I screamed immediately, “Oh, No,” I knew instinctively…John took his life. He couldn’t face the trial, knowing he might end up going to federal prison. I never thought I would see someone I knew to commit suicide because of IRS issues. John didn’t even know what the judgment would be. While cleaning up the partnership files after John’s death, I thought that if I had known what the issues were, I could have helped him. After that tragedy, the trajectory of my focus changed to help troubled taxpayers to resolve their tax problems with the IRS. Every tax problem has a solution, and I will do my very best to help my clients solve their IRS and State tax problems and get their lives back.