Reading the Internal Revenue Manual

The Internal Revenue Manual is the operational and procedural manual of the Internal Revenue Service. It is the record of how the Service administers the tax law — how examinations are opened, how collection actions are taken, how appeals are heard, how administrative practice is conducted.

Every IRM citation is a sequence of numbers separated by periods: Part.Chapter.Section, with further Subsection numbers appended. The structure is stable and hierarchical.

1. Part — the first number. Broad operational area (Part 1: Organization; Part 4: Examining Process; Part 5: Collecting Process; Part 20: Penalty and Interest; Part 25: Special Topics).
2. Chapter — the second number. Subject grouping within the Part.
3. Section — the third number. The individual authored unit; each Section is a discrete IRM authority.
4. Subsection — subsequent numbers. Internal structure of the Section, used for pinpoint citation.

The IRM is authoritative for how the Service operates. It is not itself a source of substantive tax law — that is the Internal Revenue Code and the regulations promulgated under it. But because the IRM is the Service's own operational record of how it administers the law it administers, its statements are frequently cited as evidence of the Service's administrative construction of the law.

A pinpoint IRM citation is the Part.Chapter.Section followed by the Subsection: IRM 5.17.1.4 refers to Part 5, Chapter 17, Section 1, Subsection 4. The Society's Reading Room preserves this citation form so that any IRM reference in the corpus is directly traceable.