Why
What the page is pointing at
A notice is a comparison that failed. Somewhere a figure you reported, or a figure you never reported, did not match a figure someone else already had. The someone else is often a bank, a payroll provider, or the agency that received a form with your number on it.
The tone of the letter is easy to overread. Most of them are a request to explain a difference, with a date. A few are a bill. The first job is to see which one arrived, and which year it names, before anyone writes a check to make the feeling stop.
Gap
Three mismatches that show up together
The name on the bank does not match the name on the return. Deposits landed in a personal account, and a form reported them as the company's. The letter is the first time those two stories are forced into one room.
A form was filed for wages, and the return shows no wages, or the reverse. That happens when an owner of a company taxed as an S corporation took distributions and never ran a pay run, or when a helper was paid and never put on a form.
An election was assumed and never accepted. The return was prepared as one type. The file says another. The notice is often the first document that uses the government's version of the type.
Week
The week it arrives
Keep the envelope. Write down the tax year, the form it names, and the date a reply is due. Pull the return for that year and the bank statement for the month the letter seems to describe. If those two already disagree with each other, the reply starts there.
Do not invent a number to match the letter. A reply that agrees with a wrong figure becomes the new record. If the letter is right, the books change. If the letter is wrong, the reply says why, with the page attached.
Us
What we do with it
We read the notice against the return and the month. We say which of the three mismatches it looks like, and what a reply has to include. If the month was never closed, the reply may have to wait on that close, and we will say so rather than mail a guess.
A letter about one year is also a comment on the year you are in. The same title, the same wage habit, or the same missing acceptance will write the same letter again unless the open months change.
