The IRS Versus The Clumsy Taxpayer

The penalty for fairly innocent goofs can run into the millions of dollars.

Is there any limit to how unpleasant the IRS can be with people who pay all their taxes but don’t fill out the forms correctly?

Monica Toth, 82, is a naturalized American whose family escaped the Nazis. The Boston area resident prepared her own tax returns, by hand, using forms copied from a public library. She omitted transactions in a Swiss bank account her father gave her in 1999. Until 2010, she also failed to send in reports listing the foreign account.