Internal Revenue Service officials said they were happy to bid adieu to the
omnipresent yet misused IRS Circular 230 disclaimer at the bottom of
practitioner e-mails, and cautioned practitioners that continued inclusion of
the disclaimer will be considered a misstatement.
“I'm here
to tell you to get that jurat, that disclaimer, off your e-mails. It's no
longer necessary,” Karen L. Hawkins, director of IRS Office of Professional
Responsibility, told practitioners at a June 20 tax conference sponsored by the
New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies in New York.
The IRS's
chief counsel, William J. Wilkins, seconded that statement, telling
practitioners in a keynote address that the “Circular 230 legend is not merely
dead, it's really most sincerely dead. So please omit.”
Final
regulations (T.D. 9668, RIN 1545-BF96) on Circular 230 were issued June 9 and
took effect June 12. The rules eased a number of requirements under the
publication, in particular doing away with the need to follow a separate set of
standards regarding “covered opinions” when providing written advice to
clients.
Practitioners
can still use a disclaimer that highlights that their legal opinion should be
confined to the facts a client has provided, Hawkins said, “but I do not want
to see jurats from any of you, after today, that say things like ‘the Internal
Revenue Service requires that I tell you,' or ‘under Circular 230 I am obliged
to say,' because those will be misstatements.”
The form
or wording of the alternative disclaimer will be up to practitioners, said
Hawkins. “I just don't want you blaming all that extra garbage at the end of
your e-mails on the Internal Revenue Service or the Office of Professional
Responsibility,” she said.
We are revising our disclaimer to provide:
DISCLAIMER OF TAX ADVICE: Any discussion
contained herein cannot be considered to be tax advice. Actual tax advice would
require a detailed and careful analysis of the facts and applicable law, which
we expect would be time consuming and costly. We have not made and have not
been asked to make that type of analysis in connection with any advice given in
this e-mail. As a result, we are required to advise you that any Federal tax
advice rendered in this e-mail is not intended or written to be used and cannot
be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed by the
IRS. In the event you would like us to perform the type of analysis
that is necessary for us to provide an opinion, that does not require the above
disclaimer, as always, please feel free to contact us.
From both a client and a business stand point, we believe that it needs to be clearly stated in our e-mails that our response to an email is just that and the amount of work to render an opinion is considerably more work and therefore more costly.
What do your think?
Have A Tax Problem?
Contact the Tax Lawyers at
Marini & Associates, P.A.
for a FREE Tax Consultation Contact US at
or Toll Free at 888-8TaxAid (
(888) 882-9243)
(888) 882-9243)
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