Welcome to Tax Tip Tuesday. Today for your tax tip, we’re going to discuss the recent announcement by the IRS to delay the opening of the 2020 tax filing season to February 12th.
So the IRS is saying that they need extra time to update their systems, to make sure they can calculate the stimulus payments properly to avoid problems down the road. So in essence, they’re taking the time now to fix all their calculations to not have problems later. Is it going to work? I hope so. I know plenty of people had problems getting the first round of stimulus, now there’s a second round of stimulus. There’s a lot of calculations that go on as part of this and hopefully the IRS is getting it figured out. 2020 tax season will be different, that’s for sure.
Now the IRS is also saying if you want to get your refund or your stimulus processed faster you should be filing electronically. So if you work with a tax professional, unless you have a reason that you need to send in a paper, generally we will all electronically file for you. It’s fast, it’s easy, it removes a lot of human error because if you file on paper, the IRS has to take that paper printout and have somebody there manually key in your return. So it exposes you to a higher level of audit risk, and also just problems in general due to human error. So if you were hoping to get your tax return filed in January, super-fast before someone could steal your identity, or if you needed that refund ASAP, unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait, but hopefully, there won’t be too many other problems. Who knows it’s the IRS, we still have problems from last year or the year before that we’re dealing with them.
If you do run into any IRS problems my firm specializes in handling IRS resolution, you might get notices or even an audit, which nobody ever wants to deal with, but we do work with taxpayers and clients to resolve those kinds of things. So that’s your #TaxTipTuesday for today and we’ll see you next time.
