Don't Mess With Taxes

Obstacles continue to crop up for taxpayers anxiously awaiting their economic stimulus payments.

We've already looked at some of the issues that are causing slow or no delivery of rebates, such as amounts misdirected to wrong bank accounts, multiple accounts selected for regular refund direct deposits, offsets to cover other debts and refund anticipation loans and/or filing fees rolled into refund products that resulted in paper rebate checks being issued instead of being sent straight to taxpayer accounts.

Unfortunately, the troubles keep piling up.

Here are some more instances, reported by the Associated Press, San Jose Mercury News, and USAToday, where economic stimulus payments are not getting into taxpayers hands:

• About 350,000 eligible households have received only partial rebates. They didn't get the additional $300 payment for their children because, in some cases, they didn't check the box on their tax return indicating that their children were eligible.

• In other cases, a few tax software companies failed to provide the information the IRS needed to make the payments. The IRS plans to mail those filers a "catch-up payment" this summer.

• Taxpayers who filed jointly with a spouse who doesn't have a Social Security number won't get any rebate. This group includes thousands of legal residents whose spouses have applied for a Social Security number, but haven't received the identifying digits.

According to this report from the CBS affiliate in Miami, if you haven't received your check yet, it'll likely be around July 11 before you see your money.

So much for fast track tax money to boost the economy.

Maybe all these screw-ups are the tax gods way of telling Washington that it needs to put a little more thought into all its tax-related processes before making promises to taxpayers that it can't keep.

IRS rebate hotline: The IRS says despite these reported problems, most of the stimulus payments have gone out smoothly. y don't believe there are any widespread problems with direct deposits of payments.

To date, the agency says nearly 30 million stimulus payments totaling more than $27 billion have been issued. Most of those were directly deposited to taxpayer accounts. Correct ones, we hope!

The IRS is working with taxpayers and banks on a case-by-case basis to resolve individual issues as quickly as possible.

You can check on the status of your rebate check at the Where's My Rebate? feature, blogged about here. You also can call the IRS rebate hotline at 1 (866) 234-2942.