<prompt> Human: My wife sent her tax forms in for 2016 on time last year, a month or two after sending all the forms in we got some mail from IRS saying they needed to audit our tax refund and there was a check in there for roughly 6000. Its now been over 8 months since that check and we got mail stating that we now owe them just over 5000 and needs to be paid.After 2 hours on hold with them they look into the issue and said they would call us back, once they called back they said they screwed up and have never seen anything like this before, instead of freezing the tax refund when they needed to audit us they sent us that check instead. And now they are saying we need to pay it back asapThey said we can appeal this but to do that they said they will add on 20 to the amount owed.What advice can anyone offer would it be silly to try appeal this or do we need to somehow get this 5000 together and pay it?  <response>: That you got the 6,000 refund is irrelevant. Are the results of the audit correct? 