If you were to casually stroll to your mailbox tomorrow and find the following items there, which would you open first: a bill from J. C. Penney’s; an advertisement for life insurance; a catalog from Victoria’s Secret; or a brown envelope from the Internal Revenue Service? I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that you would probably open the brown envelope from the IRS first. And I imagine that your hands might be a little shaky, your mind would be going ninety-to-nothing, and you would practically destroy that envelope to get to the contents. Your tension and anxiety would most likely increase if the word "audit" appeared anywhere in that letter, wouldn’t it?

Very few of us greet and IRS audit with enthusiasm. We wonder if we did anything wrong. We wonder if our records will adequat…