You paid thousands, months passed, and the IRS letters never stopped. You are living the tax relief industry's signature outcome: commissioned salespeople promising pennies on the dollar, case managers shuffling files, and no lawyer anywhere near your case. Before anger, get facts - because whether real work happened is verifiable, and the verification shapes everything you do next.
Verify in One Afternoon
Two records do not lie. Your IRS account transcripts show every action on your account: an offer filed posts a code, an installment agreement posts, a hardship determination posts. If the transcripts show nothing since you hired them, nothing was filed. Second, the IRS's representative database shows who holds power of attorney on your account - if the firm never even filed the Form 2848, they never represented you at all. Demand a written status report and a copy of everything filed; the response, or silence, completes the picture.
Recover What You Can
If the work was not done, the contract and your state's consumer protection laws are the levers: written refund demands citing the specific non-performance, chargebacks where payment timing allows, complaints to the state attorney general and the FTC - which has acted against tax relief operators repeatedly. If the people handling your file were attorneys, the state bar adds another avenue. Recovery is uneven, but documented demands recover real money often enough to be worth the hour they take.
Triage What They Neglected
The expensive part is rarely the fee - it is what happened to your case during the silence: deadlines missed, penalties grown, levies that proceeded while you believed someone was handling it. So the priority is a fresh damage assessment: transcripts pulled, deadlines mapped, anything urgent stabilized, and then the resolution your facts actually support, pursued by someone whose license is on the line. That is the structural difference a law practice offers: you talk to the lawyer, and the lawyer does the work. Bring me the file - including their contract - and we will sort out both recoveries at once. Let's talk.