CP400 and CP401 Notices: IRS Appeals Has Your Case

What the CP400 and CP401 notices say

The IRS page says the CP400 goes to individuals and the CP401 goes to businesses. Both tell you that the Independent Office of Appeals received your case.

The notice also tells you how long to wait. The IRS page says Appeals will contact you within 45 or 60 days, depending on your type of case. If that time passes with no word, the page tells you to call the Appeals Customer Service line.

The notice carries a QR code that links to the IRS’s Appeals pages at IRS.gov/appeals.

What Appeals is

Congress created the Independent Office of Appeals in IRC 7803(e). The statute gives it one job: “to resolve Federal tax controversies without litigation” on a basis that is “fair and impartial to both the Government and the taxpayer.”

The IRS page puts it the same way. Appeals “looks at the facts and the law in your case to try to settle your dispute with the IRS.”

What happens next

The IRS page says your Appeals Officer will contact you by letter or phone to schedule the date and time of your conference. A conference is a meeting where you and the Appeals Officer talk through the dispute.

The IRM, the IRS’s staff manual, lists the first letter Appeals sends for each kind of case. For most cases not in Tax Court, it is Letter 5157. For a case already in Tax Court, it is Letter 3808. A Collection Due Process case gets Letter 4837 or Letter 3846. An offer in compromise appeal outside Collection Due Process gets Letter 5576.

If your case is a Collection Due Process hearing, our CDP hearing prep tool shows your request dates and the issues you may raise.

The IRM also lists papers Appeals may send with its first letter. One of them is Notice 1016, How to Stop Interest on Your Account, which the IRM says explains how to stop interest on a proposed liability. If your dispute involves tax the IRS proposes, read it.

Your right to see the IRS’s file first

Before your conference, you may have a right to see what the IRS has in its file.

IRC 7803(e)(7) covers a “specified taxpayer.” For a person, that means adjusted gross income of $400,000 or less for the year in dispute. For a business or other taxpayer, it means gross receipts of $5 million or less. When a specified taxpayer asks for a conference and Appeals schedules it, Appeals must give that taxpayer the nonprivileged parts of the case file on the disputed issues “not later than 10 days before the date of such conference.”

The file does not include papers you gave the IRS yourself. The statute also lets you choose to hold the conference sooner and get the file by the conference date. IRM 8.6.1.2.1.1 tells Appeals staff to offer this access during their first contact. If they do not mention it and you qualify, ask for it.

What people mistake the CP400 and CP401 for

Some people read the CP400 as a new bill or a new audit. It is neither. It confirms that Appeals has a case already in progress.

Others read it as a decision. The notice reports that Appeals received the case; it does not report a result.

Some people also mix up the kinds of appeal. The IRS page points to separate guides for appealing an examination and for appealing a collection action. Our appeal channel router lays out the collection routes side by side, with the deadline for each.

Common Questions