IRS Oopsie
For the first time in decades, all our tax information got to us quickly enough that we could file as soon as the IRS declared open season, so I quickly tele-filed and was having a really nice chunk of circus money coming back … then the IRS rejected my return.
Having worked for the IRS, I dug out the phone number of someone I knew in the agency and called to ask “wtf.” He checked and told me that I was just one of thousands that were rejected for this particular error and that there was no file or penalty involved. Just correct the return and resubmit.
Here’s the error for those who might fall astray of it: According to the on-line tax preparation program I used, I qualified an $800 Making Work Pay credit. Here’s a link that explains what, exactly, this credit is about. The upside is that, if one qualifies, it’s a $400 credit ($800 for married, filing joint), which is always fun. The downside … Well, remember how some people received a $250 “economic recovery payment” last year?
I sure didn’t. It turns out that there was a single question on the program about that on the program and my checking “no” equaled our qualifying for the full $800 credit, when the proper “yes” response would have dropped us to $300, which was the correct credit amount for us.
So if you don’t remember if you received that $250 payment, there’s a number at the link you can call to find out and save yourself the hassle of having to resubmit. Just another tax tip, courtesy of the Sailor Jim Financial Network.
Typical IRS SNAFU, Jim. When I went to work for them in January 2002 (during the 2001 tax season) we had the exact same problem with the stimulus “rebates” paid in 2001. The problem wasn’t that IRS was being evil, but that about half the taxpayers didn’t understand that the check they’d gotten from the gummint the previous fall was an advance against their refund, so they’d try to claim it again and the return would fall out with an error, go to Error Resolution, where I worked. That year our easy, fast error correction was Error 279, when a taxpayer claimed the wrong amount for the rebate, or got confused and tried to claim it twice. To fix it, you cleared the Error 279, cleared the resulting Error 280, and the return went on through. Getting a block of returns full of those errors helped boost our individual metrics no end.