If you were expecting a federal tax refund and didn't receive it, see the Where's My IRS Refund page. You'll need to enter your Social Security number, marital status, and the exact total dollar amount of your refund. You may want to find out if the IRS owes you money. First, review your records to make sure that you have filed a tax return for each of the last three years in which you earned income.
Direct deposit is a safe, reliable, and convenient way to receive federal payments. Both the Treasury Department's Office of the Tax Service and the Internal Revenue Service encourage the direct deposit of IRS tax refunds. Direct deposit combined with electronic filing from the IRS provides taxpayers with the fastest and most secure way to receive refunds. To determine the status of your return, you can use the IRS tax refund tracker, which will also let you know if your return has been rejected by the IRS due to errors.
The agency must verify certain credits or dependents, or it has determined that your tax refund will be reduced to pay the money it believes you owe. Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, part 210 (31), part 2 of the CFR, requires that federal payments be sent to a deposit account at a financial institution in the name of the recipient. To download an instant transcript, you'll need to create an IRS account online if you don't already have one. An RDFI is not responsible for an IRS tax refund sent through the ACH network to an erroneous or fraudulent account, since the IRS provided incorrect account information.
This resource page with frequently asked questions about IRS tax refunds provides financial institutions with useful information as a reference and help customers during the tax filing season. If the delay is due to a necessary tax correction made to a recovery refund credit, earned income tax or additional child tax credit claimed on your return, the IRS will send you an explanation. Under the voluntary subscription program, once the RDFI participating in the program identifies the alleged fraud, the payment is returned to the Treasury Tax Service, which sends the payment to the IRS for further investigation. You can also request a free wage and income transcript from the IRS and then use the information in the transcript to file your tax return.
First, NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association, implemented a voluntary subscription program at the request of the IRS and the Treasury Tax Service to allow RDFIs to use a specific return reason code (R1) to return refunds when fraud is suspected. If the payment was misdirected to the wrong account and the funds are still available, the Treasury Tax Service may ask the RDFI to return these funds to the IRS using the return reason code R06 (request as requested by the ODFI). The IRS reported that it processed 97% of the more than 145 million returns it received this year and issued a few more than 96 million refunds. There are other IRS refund codes that a small percentage of taxpayers receive, which indicate freezes, mathematical errors on tax returns, or undelivered checks.
