While one of your more more excitable high school classmates will tell you that purchasing and holding onto your senior yearbook in perpetuity is a graduate’s duty to their fellow classmates, maintaining tax records is actually a real part of your duties as a taxpayer. But unlike hauling around an 8.5” x 11” yearbook, keeping track of and maintaining tax records is time-consuming and a real hassle.

And if you haven’t made the transition yet to electronic documents, your tax records can take up valuable physical storage space. Clearing some of the clutter by destroying old tax records may seem like an attractive option, but in the event of an audit, you could live to regret that decision.

So, what’s the least you can do to maintain your records and minimize storage requirements while protecting yourself in the event of an audit? In this blog post, we review tax record retention requirements and related issues to help you answer these questions for yourself.

Tax Record Retention Requirements

Every taxpayer is required by Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 6001 to maintain adequate tax records and to make those records available to the IRS upon request. The Section 6001 regulations also require taxpayers to keep the records for as long as they may be material to tax law administration. In that regard, the IRS Continue reading… Continue reading… Continue reading…