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Where’s My Tax Refund?

How to check the status of your 2010 tax refund from the IRS

You did your part. You filed your taxes and now you’re waiting on the refund. It’s an age-old question, the one that inevitably follows the sublime exhaustion of finally getting your return off to Uncle Sam: Where’s my 2010 tax refund?

First, take note that even under the best of circumstances, your tax refund is going to take some time: typically 8-15 days for direct deposit e-filers, 3 weeks for paper check e-filers, and up to 6 weeks for filers by mail.

If your tax refund is taking a long time or you are just curious about its status:

  • Go to the IRS website and use the Where’s My Refund? tool. All you have to do is pop in your social security number, filing status, and refund amount to get a status update.
  • Alternately, the IRS has an app, IRS2Go, for the iPhone and for Android that let’s you check your refund status on the go.
  • Or call the IRS Refund Hotline at 800-829-1954.
  • E-filers should have their tax refund status posted online within 72 hours.
  • Paper returns should have a status online within 3-4 weeks.
  • If you filed before July 1, the information will stay online until the first week of December.
  • If you filed after July 1, or your refund check was returned to the IRS as undeliverable, the information will stay online until you file taxes the following year.
  • Your return may not have been accepted by the IRS. Check the status of your e-filed return.
  • If you requested a direct deposit, the account and routing numbers could be incorrect and if you requested a paper check your address could be incorrect.
  • There could be an error on the return itself. The IRS provides a list of common errors that could be responsible for holding up your return.
  • Or the IRS could have flagged your return for review, increasing processing time, or even selected you for an audit.
  • If your normal income tax refund is delayed, this could be the case for any number of reasons.

In the case of an audit, the IRS will contact you, but if there is any other problem or delay with your return, the status on Where’s My Refund will most likely ask you to contact the IRS. You’ll have to call the IRS at 800-829-1954 or 800-829-4477 to talk to a real live person and resolve the fate of your 2010 tax refund.

You also may be wondering about the timing of this information. For example, when does the information go up? How long does it stay online?

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The IRS commissioner has a vision. No space aliens or fluffy unicorns involved.

Doug Schulman opens the aperture wide on the future of the tax system.

IRS commissioner Doug Schulman’s annual speech at the National Press Club a week ago was substantively bolder than last year’s somewhat defensive plea on behalf of the IRS’s commitment to service as opposed to mere enforcement. This time around, he proposed no less than to, in his words, “open the aperture wide” and offer a view of our quickly evolving tax system that “takes us to its very horizon”.

The commissioner was quick to point out that he did not intend to peddle in the kind of science fiction that would befit a Worlds of Tomorrow anthology but instead to present a vision of the future grounded in the recent developments in tax processing that modern technology has made possible. It was an engaging performance, bolstered by a challenging proposal that, we suspect, will not escape controversy.

The goal of the IRS in Schulman’s take is to move beyond what he calls the “looking back” business model which, according to the commissioner, has governed the agency’s operations since its creation during the Civil War, above all when it deals with matters of tax compliance. Continue reading “The IRS commissioner has a vision. No space aliens or fluffy unicorns involved.”

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IRS: “Help Us Decide Who Does Your Taxes”

This just in: the IRS wants taxpayers to help them decide which tax preparers… they can decide to work with.

At first, it seems like a pretty redundant exercise: the IRS is asking taxpayers and other interest groups to decide what criteria they’d like someone to satisfy before that person can prepare their taxes. People already do this — by paying someone to prepare their taxes. So what is the IRS trying to add here? Continue reading “IRS: “Help Us Decide Who Does Your Taxes””