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on August 29, 2001 she mailed in a request for a collection due
process (or CDP) hearing--and mailed it to the correct IRS
service center. At nearly the same time, though, she also sent
the IRS a Form 8857, used to request innocent spouse relief. It
seems that she was being cautious--a taxpayer in her position can
ask for innocent spouse relief at the CDP hearing, and doesn’t
need to ask for innocent spouse relief separately.
And here her troubles began, because she seems to have
mailed her Form 8857 to the same IRS service center to which she
had mailed her request for a CDP hearing--instead of handing it
to the Appeals officer at the hearing or mailing it to the
special address for innocent spouse relief requests, as the
instructions for the Form 8857 say she should have done. She
also didn’t mention her wish for innocent spouse relief on the
form that she used to ask for a CDP hearing. Her Form 8857 got
lost in the IRS bureaucracy, with an incorrect entry in a
computer database showing that the request was being considered
by the IRS’s Compliance Division when it really wasn’t. Not
until October 2002--more than a year after she sent it in--did
the IRS Appeals officer in Alaska who was looking at Negoescu’s
request for a CDP hearing discover the mistake. That Appeals
officer then quickly sent the Form 8857 to the section of the IRS
that reviews and decides innocent spouse requests--the Cincinnati
Centralized Innocent Spouse Operation (which despite its name is
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Last modified: May 25, 2011