Taxes are complicated, but some rules are simple. Respect these three rules, and you’ll reduce the chance of coming to grief with the Internal Revenue Service.

1. Keep business and personal affairs separate

You’ll be better off if you can separate your tax life into business and personal. 

I’ve seen many tax disputes in my 30-year career as a tax lawyer that came down to a violation of this fundamental divide. Trying to morph personal into business is asking for trouble, including:

• Deducting the cost of a divorce because your business is at risk.
• Deducting a miserable vacation with a best client.
• Claiming a hobby was really for profit.

You may do things with a dual motive, like having a pleasant lunch with a business colleague, going on vacation with your best client or buying a vacation home you also intend as an investment. Still, your tax life will be easier if you try to avoid dual-purpose goals. (Post continues below video.)

2. Keep good records

You might think keeping good records is something that can help you only if you actually end up in a tax controversy. Yet keeping good records can keep you out of tax trouble in the first place.

For example, recreational gamblers should keep a diary of how much they bet and lose on each visit. You can use gambling losses to offset your winnings (casinos report these to the IRS). Another example is charitable donations. The law requires you to have proof of every donation you deduct.

Does the IRS really care about record keeping? Yes. Most audits are correspondence audits. You may be told your deductions will be disallowed unless you mail back records substantiating them.

3. Respect and keep those 1099s

How you handle third-party "information returns," such as Forms 1099, year-round will influence how hard a time you have when you file your return and interact with the IRS thereafter. Whether you are payee or payer, you need a system to record and track these information returns. That’s exactly what the IRS does.

A lot of what goes on at the IRS is computer matching -- the endless correlation of taxpayer identification numbers and payments. Even a small mismatch between what’s on these forms and what you report on your tax return will be caught and could result in months of hassles with the IRS. Much of what the IRS does, when it comes to monitoring taxpayers, is information return matching.

There are different forms for miscellaneous income. When you get your 1099s, don’t just stick them in a drawer. Look at them. Payers are required to mail all 1099s to payees no later than Jan. 31. Then, the payer has an additional month (until the end of February) to send all of its 1099s to the IRS. This one month lag means that if you receive a 1099 you know is wrong, there may be time to correct it before the IRS receives a copy.

If you receive an incorrect 1099 (and this is common), contact the payer who issued the erroneous form as soon as you receive it. Explain the error and ask whether a copy of the 1099 has already been sent to the IRS. If the payer has already sent a copy of the erroneous form to the IRS, you can still ask for a correction. In that event, the payer should issue a corrected 1099 (there’s a special box for this).

More from Forbes.com and MSN Money:

• Avoid IRS audit triggers
• 5 mistakes your CPA won’t tell you but your tax return will
• 5 ways to make the most of the payroll tax cut extension
• What to do if your refund is stolen

• Taxes that net a tax deduction

• 11 common tax mistakes