BRYAN, Texas — The deadline to file your taxes is quickly approaching on Tuesday, April 18.
Local tax offices may be swamped with appointments, but a tax expert shares with us how you can still file and what you need to know ahead of the deadline.
“Be mindful of the last hours here and get something to the IRS,” Mark Steber, Chief Tax Officer, Jackson Hewitt said.
“You can electronically file, you can send in a postmarked paper extension or tax return, but you need to do something by the deadline.”
Mark Steber with Jackson Hewitt Tax Services says it’s likely for you to get a refund.
“Three out of four taxpayers get a refund,” said Steber.
“Now this year, refunds are a little bit less and even the amounts, or the size of the refund is about 70 percent, not 75.”
He even says e-filing is a quicker, more efficient, and more accurate route.
“The IRS has paid out about 200 billion in refunds so far to about 70 million people,” said Steber. “I don’t know why people don’t want to go and get their money, or at a minimum, figure out how much you owe so you can start to work towards that.”
Steber says there are several reasons why people wait to file, but not meeting the deadline comes with penalties.
“There’s a failure to file and a failure to pay,” said Steber. “If you send in your tax return and you don’t pay, or you send in an extension and you don’t pay, you avoid the failure to file penalty. Now you may still have a failure to pay penalty if you didn’t send in your money, but you can at least take that off the table and get that headache out of the way.”
In the event you need an extension, you’ll need to fill out form 4868. It’s an extension to file paperwork but not an extension to pay, allowing you six more months.
“You can run into failure to file penalties, which can be upward of 25 percent of any taxes that you owe, you can have a failure to pay penalty, underpayment penalty, and even interest on top of all of that and then ultimately, if you get around to it, a tax professional to help clean it all up,” said Steber.
Steber says with the difficulty of the economy and the pandemic, there are numerous payment installment options you can set up with a tax pro if you do owe on your taxes.
