My free advice from last Friday: do not think that you can clean, sort, organize, and move an entire household in three days while prepping for the first 16 day stretch of your tax season work-cation. It does not work well. This Friday finds me in one location and enjoying meeting with our amazing clients while doing the work that I love.
The IRS filing season has officially been open for 12 days. In those 288 hours Ralph and I have prepared over 70 tax returns. With most of those returns, we are seeing lower refunds due to lower withholding (see my previous post regarding withholding) on federal returns. Generally, state and local returns are not seeing dramatic changes due to the simple flat tax that each imposes.
Refunds are being received, but remember that in order to help safe-guard against identity theft, those tax returns claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit and/or the Additional Child Tax Credit will not be released until the 15th of February. However, the actual receipt of the refund could be a bit longer depending on IRS and financial institution processing time. You can keep an eye on your refund via our website www.sayeandassociates.com; click on “Check your federal refund” on our Links page. For all other returns, and all returns filed after February 15th, the general rule is that you should have your refund 21 days from the acceptance date. Please remember that once we have sent the return and received an e-file confirmation, what happens next is completely out of our hands.
What to expect in the next 1,560 hours: I anticipate that we will consume well over 15,000 mg of caffeine, go through over 20 cases of paper, spend over 1,000 more hours at our desks, and prepare an estimated 200,000 different tax forms! In 1,561 hours we will be sleeping where we fall.
My Free Advice for this Friday is bookmark our website so you can keep an eye on your refunds.
Check back next week for an update on how our office staff survives the season. It may or may not involve Nerf guns.
~Amy