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About ClearNotice

About ClearNotice

ClearNotice exists for one moment: the one where you're standing at the mailbox holding a letter from the IRS, heart rate climbing, understanding almost nothing except that it looks expensive.

Why this exists

Every year, the IRS sends taxpayers a very large volume of automated notices and letters. Most are generated by computers, written in statutory language, and mailed to people who have never been taught to read them. The result is a strange, expensive gap: a letter that is often negotiable, reducible, or simply wrong gets treated as a verdict, because nobody could understand it in time to respond.

What happens in that gap is what bothered us enough to build this. People pay proposed amountsthat were never correct, because "proposed" looked like "final." People book $300-500 consultations to have a one-page letter read to them. And people freeze, letting a 30-day window quietly close, watching a solvable problem compound into penalties and interest, missing rights they didn't know they had.

A letter you understand is a problem you can handle. That single sentence is the entire company.

So we built a translator. You photograph your IRS letter, and software explains it in plain English, what it means, what it's really asking, your exact deadline, and what happens if you do nothing. That explanation is free, always, along with our lookup, calculators, quiz and glossary. If you then decide to respond and want help preparing the documents, that's the part we charge for, $39, once. You review everything, you sign, you send. Your response, your name, your decision.

How we make money (the honest version)

We're a software company with exactly one revenue stream: preparing response document packages that customers choose to buy after their free explanation. We don't sell your data, a promise made contractually, not decoratively. We don't run ads. We don't take referral fees from tax professionals. We don't upsell subscriptions you'll forget to cancel; everything is one-time. If the free explanation solves your problem and you never pay us a cent, that is a successful visit, those visitors become the people who recommend us during the worst week of someone else's year.

What we are

  • A document preparation service, software that explains your notice and prepares response documents for you to review and sign.
  • A translator, from IRS statutory language to plain English, verified against official IRS publications.
  • A deadline-keeper, reminders so the response you prepared actually gets sent in time.
  • Radically transparent, free means free; $39 means $39, once.

What we are not

  • Not a law firm, CPA firm, or enrolled agents, we don't give legal or tax advice, and no professional-client relationship is created. Full disclaimer.
  • Not affiliated with the IRS or any government agency, in any way.
  • Not a "make your tax debt disappear" shop, we don't promise outcomes, and we tell you when your situation needs a licensed professional.
  • Not for every case, criminal matters, Tax Court litigation and complex disputes belong with an attorney, CPA or enrolled agent, and we say so.

Our accuracy standards

Everything published on this site follows four rules:

01 Sourced from the IRS itself

Every notice guide is written against the corresponding official IRS page and publications, not against other blogs. When the IRS changes a procedure, we update or we're wrong.

02 Dated and maintained

Guides display their last-reviewed date. Tax administration changes; a page that can't tell you when it was last checked shouldn't be trusted, including ours.

03 Plain English, no fear-mongering

We tell you when a letter is genuinely urgent, and just as clearly when it can waitor requires nothing at all. Panic is the competitor's business model, not ours.

04 Honest about our limits

General information is not personal advice. When a situation exceeds what document preparation should handle, our guides say "hire a professional", in those words.

The person behind this

David Rieu, founder of ClearNotice

David Rieu

Founder & Software Engineer

I'm a web developer, and I build software that translates bureaucracy into plain language. ClearNotice started with a simple observation: every day, thousands of people photograph an IRS letter with shaking hands and post it to strangers on the internet with the same three words, "what does this mean?" The information they need is public. The deadlines are printed right there. But the language is built for lawyers, and the fear does the rest.

That felt like a solvable problem, not with another $5,000 "tax relief" phone call, but with software: read the letter, explain it in the words a friend would use, and prepare the response documents so you can act instead of panic. So I built it.

I'm an engineer, not a tax professional, and that's deliberate. ClearNotice doesn't sell advice or miracles. It prepares documents, shows its sources, tells you when a notice is simple enough to handle alone, and tells you honestly when you should hire a licensed pro. Software should make the government legible. That's the whole mission.

See it work on your actual letter

The best introduction isn't this page, it's uploading your notice and watching it become something you understand. Free, no account, under a minute.

Upload my notice, free