The purpose of Form 433-A is to provide the IRS with the taxpayeru2019s detailed financial information, usually in the context of an Offer in Compromise (OIC) or an installment payment plan.If the IRS believes that it can collect the entire debt owed with minimal effort on its part, it will not accept an OIC, regardless of taxpayer claims of economic hardship. I can't imagine a circumstance where the IRS will accept a barter arrangement with a taxpayer, especially when the taxpayer appears to have sufficient assets otherwise to cover the debt but doesn't want to give them up for that purpose. Most taxpayers in a situation like this are going to try to come up with imaginative ways to avoid paying a debt, and the IRS is decidedly unsympathetic to such approaches.The IRSu2019s job is to collect taxes that are due the government under existing tax law. Deferred payment arrangements are used as a legal tax avoidance strategy, but as part of the price for allowing them to be used that way, Congress wrote in provisions that restrict the ability of employers and employees to use them to shelter large amounts of income that would otherwise be taxed, and the tax bite you get on ISOs is one of those provisions. The IRS is going to enforce those provisions. Realize that what you are being taxed on isn't u201cphantomu201d income, but income that you would have been taxed on had you chosen a different compensation arrangement, and on which you chose to defer the bite.