Law Office of Steven A. Leahy, PC

Law Office of Steven A. Leahy, PC Attorney Steven A. Leahy has served the Chicago area and beyond over the past two decades. He works

09/24/2026

Mixing personal and business finances is the fastest way to turn a minor IRS inquiry into a full investigation.

Messy books give auditors reasons to ask bigger questions.

When your records are clean, every transaction categorized, personal and business completely separate, you give an auditor very little room to expand.

When they're not, one question about one expense becomes a question about every expense.

Clean books aren't just about good accounting. They're legal protection. They limit exposure.

And in an audit, they can be the difference between a minor review and a months-long examination of your entire financial life.

09/24/2026

A lien and a levy are not the same thing.

Hear the word lien and most people assume the IRS is taking their property.

That's not true.

A lien is a legal claim.

A levy is the actual taking of property.

A lien attaches to everything you own and everything you will own, but it doesn't seize anything.

It simply protects the government's position.

The IRS also doesn't file one automatically.

It weighs the size of the liability, your payment history, collection potential, and risk.

Knowing the difference removes unnecessary fear.

Save this, and tell me: what did you think a lien meant?

09/22/2026

The IRS isn't your ally, it's a collections agency built to get as much money from you as possible, not to explain your taxes to you.

I've represented people owing thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions to the IRS.

What decided their outcome was never the size of the debt, it was strategy.

Once you understand exactly where you stand in the IRS process, you know what comes next.

And once you know what's next, you stop reacting out of fear and start acting with a deliberate plan.

Knowledge turns panic into power, and strategy beats fear every time.

09/22/2026

The goal in an IRS audit is not to appear maximally cooperative.

It's to answer what's asked, protect your records, and control the scope of the examination.

Those are different things entirely. Over-cooperation without strategy isn't a virtue in an audit, it's a liability.

You're not trying to impress the auditor or bury them in information to prove your innocence.

You're managing a formal examination, and the less it expands, the better your outcome is likely to be.

Answer clearly, share what's required, and nothing more.

That's not obstruction.
That's understanding exactly how this process is supposed to work.

09/17/2026

IRS auditors review fabricated records every single day.

They know exactly what they look like. Here's what's important to understand: reconstructing lost records is sometimes completely acceptable.

If documentation was genuinely lost, a credible reconstruction using bank statements or consistent patterns can work.

What isn't acceptable is pretending the records were never lost in the first place, presenting invented documents as originals.

The cover-up is almost always worse than the original problem.

If records are gone, acknowledge it and reconstruct honestly.

Auditors aren't guessing when they spot something fake.

They've seen it hundreds of times before you walked in.

09/17/2026

IRS balances grow fast because three things stack together: daily interest, a failure to pay penalty, and a failure to file penalty.

Interest compounds not just on your original tax debt but on the penalties too, so the total grows larger every month you wait.

Here's what most people miss: every IRS notice already includes the deadline, your appeal rights, phone numbers, and instructions.

The real problem was never a lack of information, it's a lack of response.

The longer you stay silent, the more expensive it becomes.

If you have an unanswered notice sitting somewhere, respond before it grows.

Address

2525 Waukegan Road Suite 210
Chicago, IL

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+13126646649

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