Taxpayers May Be Eligible for Significant Tax Refunds – If They Act by July 10

60 points by goldfishgold 20 hours ago on hackernews | 37 comments

ericpauley | 20 hours ago

This is potentially the most usful AI slop blog post I've ever read.

butvacuum | 20 hours ago

I'll save everybody else 120s: if you didn't get penalized for filing your taxes late during covid, move on.

MilnerRoute | 20 hours ago

It's not just if you filed late. It also says payments "due any time within that window were not late until after July 10, 2023."

So for example, if you were a contractor who paid your taxes on April 15 (rather than making quarterly payments).

nozzlegear | 18 hours ago

Shit, that was me. I never pay my quarterly payments, it's easier (for me) to let the government send me a bill lol.

dawnerd | 18 hours ago

Used to do the same, realized the penalty was so minor compared to my time filing quarterly.

ocdtrekkie | 18 hours ago

I think the interest rate is 7% so if you have other debts, not making the quarterly payments is probably the cheapest loan you can get.

butvacuum | 14 hours ago

true enough.

carlivar | 18 hours ago

It seems to also argue that we all have claims for lost interest on what we paid to the IRS during the period in question, but that's a stretch. I am getting Wesley Snipes tax advisor vibes here and will move along.

DANmode | 17 hours ago

> I am getting Wesley Snipes tax advisor vibes here and will move along.

From the IRS?

aleksejs | 14 hours ago

It argues no such thing. Of the 20 instances of the word "interest", 19 are obviously referring to the interest that the IRS will charge you on your balance if you don't pay your taxes by the due date. The one remaining one is this:

> Overpayment interest for the 2020–2023 disaster period.

and refers to the interest that the IRS will pay you if they owe you money (a refund) that they don't manage to return to you in a timely manner.

(All of this is explained on the main IRS website: https://www.irs.gov/payments/interest)

carlivar | 9 hours ago

It mentions "Overpayment interest for the 2020–2023 disaster period" which I figured could be applied broadly, but I guess that was more my interpretation rather than the intention.

righthand | 20 hours ago

> The IRS should quickly develop a means to allow taxpayers to file their claims electronically and implement it immediately. The IRS and taxpayers do not need paper Forms 843 clogging up the system.

tekla | 20 hours ago

https://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov

I can't tell if this is trying to seem fake.

caymanjim | 19 hours ago

Seriously. This reads like self-promotion of a bad YouTube channel or something. It's amateurish, full of self-aggrandizement and opinions. This has no place coming from our gov't.
What seems fake about it?

tekla | 18 hours ago

Compare this site to the base domain.

https://www.irs.gov/

Do you think it looks official? Or does it look like someone spent $10 on a 3rd world rando to make a site on Wordpress and a spoofed URL and didn't even bother to make it part of the official site.

DANmode | 17 hours ago

> Do you think it looks official?

I check the address bar for that.

tekla | 17 hours ago

You mean the thing that has been the source of many cybersecurity issues for years because fonts w/ ambiguous characters and varying levels of "how closely are you actually reading the URL"?

The very thing where sites like gmai1.com that look exactly like the real site phish creds?

Or things that even Google has issues with subdomains?

https://hoxhunt.com/blog/advanced-phishing-attack-using-goog...

The IRS site does use lots of subdomains like https://sa.www4.irs.gov, but even it looks like its using the same design language as the normal site.

DANmode | 14 hours ago

> You mean the thing that has been the source of many cybersecurity issues for years because fonts w/ ambiguous characters and varying levels of "how closely are you actually reading the URL"? The very thing where sites like gmai1.com that look exactly like the real site phish creds?

Yes, that’s the one.

If I’m really paranoid, I’ll:

1.) avoid providing data to that page

2.) cross-reference host IP

3.) find the page on the original URL via search index

tekla | 6 hours ago

So you dont just read the address bar as claimed

altairprime | 17 hours ago

blitzar | 15 hours ago

> An official website of the U.S. Gov

Looks as legit as the email I got from the official office of The Prince of Nigeria.

londons_explore | 19 hours ago

> Without IRS or congressional action, outcomes may unfairly favor the “well advised” over the “unaware.”

Part of the governments job should be to make sure those with expensive advisors do not end up much better off than those who do their own taxes with little knowledge of tax law.

The purpose of taxes is not to tax the dumb extra.

you're right but the purpose of the IRS is to tax the dumb extra.

idiotsecant | 17 hours ago

The designed purpose of the IRS is to raise funds for governance. It's been captured and drained of resources by the capital class so that it's actual operational purpose is making sure that rich people pay as few taxes as possible by looking the other way when they don't obey the law.

Yet another insurmountable bug in capitalism - those with the capital make the rules, and usually the new rules allow them to accumulate further capital. Rinse and repeat.

londons_explore | 17 hours ago

A super simple fix is to encourage the rich to have more children. If they have 6 children and divide their wealth 6 ways, that rebalances wealth inequality every generation.

Easy enough to do via tax policy too. Eg. 10% tax reduction per child.

idiotsecant | 7 hours ago

This is generally the case anyway. The problem is that one lifetime is plenty of time to accumulate enormous capital and do enormous damage. In fact, I care almost exclusively about the problems that they will cause during my lifetime.

bsimpson | 19 hours ago

I have a vague recollection of being charged a penalty I didn't agree with and arguing with the IRS about it during the pandemic.

I couldn't tell you what or how much it was for now though.

eclipticplane | 18 hours ago

Go pull your account transcript for the years in question.
> A Practical Challenge: Paper Is Still the IRS’s Kryptonite

Please just give us the prompt.

SoftTalker | 19 hours ago

I still file my tax returns on paper, via certified mail.

loloquwowndueo | 18 hours ago

Why?

SoftTalker | 18 hours ago

> For COVID-19, a federal disaster declaration was in effect from January 20, 2020, through May 11, 2023. [...] As noted, tens of millions of taxpayers have been assessed penalties or interest for late filings or payments during these years.

I'm a little surprised that many people are late with their tax filings.

sokoloff | 17 hours ago

It’s not late filings as much as late payments (late quarterly estimated taxes, under-withholding beyond safe harbor rules, etc.)

Lots of people who are self-employed or who make a high W-2 income and receive irregular payments/gains (bonuses, RSU vests, capital gains) fall into this category.

Late filings are almost trivial to avoid; late payments are significantly harder to entirely avoid as, depending on your tax situation, many of the payments are due 12, 9, 6, or 3 months earlier than April 15.

SoftTalker | 17 hours ago

I suppose. I've had years in the past where I had sporadic self-employment income, and I filed estimated payments only for the quarters where I had income, maybe even was late or combined a couple of quarters every now and then. I never got penalized as long as the amount I owed for the year had been paid by April 15. Maybe I was a small enough fish that they just didn't care.

sokoloff | 17 hours ago

Most likely you met one of the safe harbor tests.

The dunning for getting this wrong is automated, so if you didn’t do it right and didn’t pass a safe harbor, they’d have sent you a notice.

gamblor956 | 16 hours ago

This site is legit. It looks off because DOGE fired a lot of people last year and mandated the use of AI for public facing content like this so it's the equivalent of something a first week intern would draft before they got taught basic professionalism.