You got an IRS letter. Breathe.

Open it

The hardest step is the flap of the envelope. Unopened IRS mail has a gravity to it — people carry a sealed letter around for weeks, and the weight grows the longer it stays sealed. Here is the truth that deflates it: the letter was written by a computer, to a template, and sent to millions of people this year. It is not a judgment of you. It is a form with your name on it.

Open it flat on a table. Keep every page, and keep the envelope too — dates and codes on both matter.

Find the code

In a corner — usually top right, sometimes bottom — there is a short code: CP14, CP2000, LT11, Letter 1058. That code is the entire identity of the letter. It tells you what kind of letter this is, what the IRS wants, and how much time the situation usually carries. Put the code into the translator and read what it means in plain English.

What an IRS letter actually is

The IRS runs on letters the way courts run on filings. Almost every process it has — billing, reviewing, auditing, collecting — is a sequence of letters, each one required before the next, most of them offering a way to resolve things at that step. A letter means you are inside a sequence, nearly always at an earlier and calmer point in it than the wording suggests.

Even the serious letters are structured this way. The one that precedes an actual levy is also the one that hands you a legal right to pause everything and be heard. The system telegraphs every move. Nothing worth fearing arrives without paper first.

The clock question

Some letters carry a response window; many don’t. The window, when it exists, is printed on the letter itself — and it is almost always wide enough to respond thoughtfully. Two habits serve everyone well: treat any printed date as real, and never let a date expire out of avoidance. The expensive outcomes in tax trouble come almost entirely from silence — windows that close quietly while a letter sits unopened in a drawer.

Tonight, gather three things

Not to send anywhere — just to have: the letter itself (every page), your tax return for the year the letter names, and any proof of payments for that year. Nearly every path forward starts with those three things on a table.

When to hand it to someone

You can read this site, understand your letter, and handle a simple one yourself — truly. People do it every day. The moment to bring in a licensed professional is when any of these is true: the letter proposes a change you disagree with, the amount is large enough to hurt, a hearing or court window is running, or the file has grown past one letter. A professional doesn’t just know the rules — they take over the correspondence, so the IRS writes to them instead of to your kitchen table.