Just another way the government loses tax payer money each year (like the post office).

My question is, how does the IRS refund or credit the depreciation costs back to me as the tax payer?

You can exchange 1 property into 20 or 5 properties into 2, SFRs into land, retail into hotel, or even DST/TIC into sole-ownership (or vice versa), etc. etc. as long as both the relinquished property(ies) and the replacement property(ies) are held for investment, it is the same taxpayer/legal entity buying and selling the properties and your trade balances.  

In this case the LLC is now the tax payer for the property so the LLC could sell and complete a 1031 exchange and continue to defer all that tax.

Time is less important than the investor’s intent at the time of acquiring the property (did the investor intend to hold the property as an investment).Taxpayers who hold their relinquished property for two years satisfy the requisite intent for a 1031 Exchange (or two tax reporting periods, since in an audit the IRS may look backwards and forwards two tax returns).

A client I am now working with was audited by MT because they saw his vacation rental listed online and they didn't have record of receiving any tax payments. 

Good news is things are getting better, but the bad news is, we are behind now on our tax payments for a property that has appreciated tremendously over the last ten years.

The county sites list the taxpayer address and as mentioned above they don't change them frequently. 

@Kendall Morgan,Can you go late on some other payments, borrow the rest and make the tax payment?

Rather than bringing home all that cash (read: tax money) and creating tons of new jobs here, my strong suspicion is perhaps only 10% of that money will be repatriated (some CEOs taking the gamble that they won't have another opportunity to bring it home at a lower rate in the future) and it will end up costing us jobs due to higher tax payments, not creating tons more as he thinks.