first flower of spring

However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right — and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong — in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.