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If you're hoping to get a quick tax refund this year, you're out of luck. The date to file your taxes has been pushed back by the IRS to the end of the month.
If you want to blame Congress for one more thing, you can blame it for the delay in getting your tax return this year. The IRS won't start rolling those checks out until the middle of February or later.
"We did a lot of work ahead of time; as much as we could. And then as soon as that bill was passed then we were able to dig into the meat of it and see how is this going to impact all the forms and all the processing we do," Shane Ferguson with the IRS said.
Many tax credits were extended, but they have to go back into the system
"There were certain things that we needed to know; one of course was the alternative minimum tax, whether that patch was going to be in place and they put that in place and we were ready for that. A couple more were the local and state sales tax deduction; the higher education tuition and fees deduction as well as the education expense deduction," Ferguson said.
While the majority of taxpayers should begin to be able to file their returns on January 30, there are a few who need specifics credits who will have to wait for a few weeks to a month to file this year.
"Some forms are just not going to be available; our processing is not going to be updated. For example, the residential energy credit; some property depreciation, some general business credits, those forms are going to take us longer to get updated and the processing fix," Ferguson said.
And while 80 percent of taxpayers do file electronically, the IRS doesn't want you to go back to paper filing this year because of the delay.
"You may have some folks who say okay, my forms look like they're ready; I am going to file a paper return and get to the head of the line. We are not going to start processing anything until January 30th and electronic filing is still going to be the best way to go," Ferguson said.
But the IRS says it's working with tax software developers and tax preparers to make sure once filing season does start, it all goes smoothly.
Last year, nine out of ten returns were directly deposited in taxpayer's checking accounts within 21 days of filing and the IRS expects that time frame to be the same this year.
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