A teacher in South Florida is trying to recover a six figure sum that she says the Internal Revenue Service wrongfully took from her. Michelle Del Bueno is fighting to get back more than 133,000 dollars that the agency seized last month, money she had set aside for her retirement in an investment account. She says she never got a chance to contest the decision before the money was gone.
For Del Bueno, the loss has been hard to carry. She described the situation as a heavy weight on her shoulders that she cannot seem to shake off. The money she lost was savings she had been building for her future, and its sudden removal left her struggling to understand how it had happened.
According to Del Bueno, the trouble began with a letter from the agency in September. She had amended her 2024 tax return to include a deduction she had forgotten to add. After that, she says, the agency turned around and told her she owed 118,000 dollars, but it did not list why. She said she could not make sense of the figure, asking what she had done wrong when she does not even earn that kind of money.
Del Bueno says that trying to sort the matter out with the IRS on her own went nowhere. She recounted calling the agency again and again, only to be told there was a case on her. She says the case was then closed, and afterwards it was reopened, leaving her without a clear answer about what she supposedly owed or how to fix it.
In January, she says, a notice arrived showing that the IRS had added penalties and that she now owed more than 127,000 dollars, with a warning that the agency was about to seize the money. By the time the IRS actually took the funds in May, still more interest and penalties had accrued, bringing the total to more than 133,000 dollars. She said she is just a teacher, not a large company, and questioned why her case appeared to have been fast tracked.
Her lawyer, Stephen Klissner, says the notice she received was actually the final notice the IRS sends before acting. He says the agency skipped some of the steps it was supposed to follow and should have shown her where the figure came from. According to him, the IRS should have sent her a series of letters and skipped them all, and he says she made no mistakes in the process.