A reflection from Nicole Forsythe, Founder, Forsythe Law Offices

Forsythe Law Office LLC Celebrates 10 Years of Providing World-Class Civil and Criminal Tax Defense to Taxpayers of Missouri & Kansas

I began my law career as an associate attorney in a Big-4 firm, providing international tax planning and compliance services to large corporate clients, then moved on to work as a corporate tax associate in Big-Law. I learned a lot during that time and made many life-long friends, but the work was not as satisfying as I had imagined. 

I love helping people, but working in corporate transactions left me feeling less connected with my clients than I had hoped. While the tax cases assigned to me were interesting and complicated, which is exactly the kind of challenge I enjoy facing, the work was impersonal. I wanted to see who I was helping and how I was helping. 

In May 2013,  I set out on my adventure as a solo tax attorney, free to explore areas outside of corporate tax law and help people directly and directly impact their daily lives – a decision I’ll never regret! 

Over this past decade, I’ve had the opportunity to build a network of mentors, co-counsel, experts, tax professionals, and lawyers who practice across all areas of the law and have supported me and my practice as it has grown. Like many independent businesses, the pandemic forced me to rethink how we were doing business. 

Until then, our office provided various general business counsel, litigation, and criminal defense alongside our tax work. We love the variety of practice areas, but civil and criminal tax defense is where we excel most and the type of law we most enjoy. As a result, we’ve committed ourselves to spend our next decade focused on helping the taxpayers of Missouri and Kansas navigate criminal and civil tax investigations and tax litigation.

Looking Forward

Increased Civil and Criminal Tax Enforcement on the Horizon

Now is the ideal time to pivot our business and focus our efforts on helping taxpayers. For some time now, the Internal Revenue Service has been woefully underfunded and understaffed. Now, they have $80 billion dollars allocated for improving operations. When they recently released their budgeting priorities, tax enforcement made the top of their list.  

The National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent organization within the IRS that assists and advocates for taxpayers, has offered its summary of the plan and thoughts here on its blog. They share a natural truth: while their goals as “the National Taxpayer Advocate are to protect taxpayer rights and improve taxpayer service, we need to acknowledge that enforcement is also central to the IRS’s tax collection mission.”

“we need to acknowledge that enforcement is also central to the IRS’s tax collection mission.”

-The National Taxpayer Adovocate

With this funding and reform effort, tax professionals and taxpayers in Missouri, Kansas, and nationwide can expect a significant increase in IRS enforcement. This enforcement will come in the form of audits and aggressive collection actions.  

Criminal tax investigations will root out crimes like tax fraud, tax evasion, and other financial crimes, more precisely through the increased implementation of artificial intelligence.

Hand-in-hand with this new funding and technology will come new staffing, procedures, and enforcement guidelines.

We are here, and we are prepared to protect taxpayer rights. 

Forsythe Law Offices will be ready to provide taxpayers targeted as subjects of collections, investigation, or prosecution with experienced criminal and civil defense when these matters occur. 

• We value our roles as navigators and negotiators. 
• We understand that our work directly impacts real lives. 
• We approach our clients, colleagues, and the process with respect. 

Our objective is now and has always been to help our clients navigate a difficult and unsettling process with dignity, to ensure they understand their rights and obligations as we resolve their legal tax issues in the best way possible while holding the government to its highest standards.

Thank you so much for the last ten years, and here’s to a future focused on helping even more people.