Retrieving Posts With Same Tags As Parent

Hey Guys,

Im currently working with tags and trying to show post titles and images of different types of posts that have the same tag. The problem I am running into is that the posts being displayed dont seem to be matching with the parents post tags.
Posts on our site can have multiple tags(Currently developing a system to change this) and on average have about 4 tags. I thought I understood how the tags work by grabbing the tags from a post and popping them into an array. I then use the tags in the array in a new query to output posts with the same tags. My code for related tags is below:

<?php           $args=array('tag_in'=>$tags,
							'exclude'=>$post->ID,
							'post_per_page'=> 4,
							'ignore_sticky_posts'=>1,
							'post_type'=>array('ms','gnd','events','news_article','opinions','projects','tenders','videos','products'));
				$rel_pst=get_posts($args);
				$count = 0;
				if($tags){
				foreach($rel_pst as $rel):setup_postdata($rel);//Loop through and find related posts
				if($count==4)
				{
					break;
				}
				$image = wp_get_attachment_image(get_post_thumbnail_id($rel->ID),'related-posts');
				//$tagy=$tags[$count];
				//Counts iterations to place aricles on seperate sides 

				 if (($count  == 0)||($count == 2)){// first article start
					echo '<div class="posts_wrapper">';
					echo '<article class="item_left">';
				}
				if(($count == 1)||($count == 3)){// second article start
				 	echo'<article class="item_right">';
				 	}
				 ?>
                  <div class="pic"> <a href="<?php echo get_permalink($rel); ?>" class="w_hover img-link img-wrap"> <?php echo $image; ?></a> </div>
                  <h3><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($rel);?>"><?php echo get_the_title($rel); ?></a></h3>
                  <div class="post-info"> <a href="<?php echo get_permalink($rel);?>" class="post_date"></a> <a href="<?php echo get_permalink($rel); ?>" class="comments_count"></a> </div>
                </article>
                <?php if(($count == 1)||($count == 3)){//second article/4th end
                	echo '</div>';
              		  }
               $count ++;
                endforeach;
 				}
                   //wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

*Please note that $tags is an array of tags.
I use the following code to store the tags from the post:

if ( have_posts() ) : while(have_posts() ) : the_post();
$tags = get_the_tags();
global $post;

I then pass this data into the code at the top using this method:
<?php include(locate_template('related-posts.php'));//pass tags into related posts ?>

Any help will be greatly appreciated