Reasons Your 2008 Tax Rebate Might Be Delayed

Are you asking yourself “I was supposed to get my tax rebate already but haven’t! Where is it?!?!?! As the majority of rebates have been transmitted by the IRS, we are starting to see a few reasons you may not have gotten it by the time you expected. Here are some that affect the most people:

1) If you used a 3rd party tax preparation company and received an advance on your rebate from them, you will most likely get a paper check from the Government for your rebate. This is because your tax return was sent to them to pay off your tax return loan. The rebate will go the same place.

2) If you owed money to the Federal Government for your 2007 taxes, and you paid it via direct debit, unless your software specifically asked you about direct deposit for the rebate, you will get a paper check, since the IRS did not get the account info that you wanted to direct deposit the rebate.

3)If you filed your 2007 tax return just before the April 15th deadline, it is possible that the IRS did not process your return prior to April 15th. If this is the case, you will receive your rebate via check. I have not seen an actual cut off date where if you submitted your tax return after that date your rebate might be delayed.

4)If you opted to pay your filing fees using the proceeds from your refund, you will receive your rebate in the form of a check. It is best to pay those fees with a credit card to keep them seperate from your rebate as this changes the way your tax return was sent to you which in turn affects your rebate.

If you think you are going to get your rebate via a check. Check out the 2008 Tax Stimulus Rebate Payout Schedule to see when you might receive your rebate.

You can also use the Rebate Status Tool to check the status of your rebate.

Where’s My Tax Rebate?

 As the electronic payouts for the rebate are complete, you may be asking your self “I was supposed to get mine via direct deposit, but didn’t, what’s up?”.

Well it seems that now more details are coming forward about the rebates. I have just found out that when you filed, if you elected to have your tax preparation fees taken out of your refund, rather then paying for them seperately, you will be receiving your rebate via a paper check, even though your refund was through direct deposit. Check the Payout Schedule to see when your check might arrive.

Another issue that has arose is that around 350,000 people were missing the $300 per child payment as part of their rebate. This was an error for people that used commercial tax preparation software such as TurboTax or TaxCut. The IRS will be issuing letters to those people to let them know of the error. Checks for the $300 per child will be issued in July to those affected.

Be sure to use the Rebate Status Tool to check the status of your rebate if you haven’t received it yet. Also, be sure to review your rebate and make sure it is the correct amount that you are expecting. With some of the glitches we have seen thus far, it is possible that more could be uncovered.

Avoid Stimulus Rebate Scams

So as usual, along with the good of the 2008 Rebate Stimulus, so comes the bad. Including those that want to swindle your money from you.

I have been reading about an email scam that looks similiar to the following:

Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of President Bush program to jumpstart the economy.

Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.

The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

Please follow the link and fill out the form and submit before May 10th, 2008 to ensure that your refund will be processed as soon as possible.

Submitting your form on May 10th, 2008 or later means that your refund will be delayed due to the volume of requests we anticipate for the Economic Stimulus Refund.

To access Economic Stimulus refund, please click here

This is a ploy to get you to enter your bank account info so that some one can use that information to start debiting money out of your account. Don’t ever enter personal information through anything that you have received via email. Even if the link in the email looks correct.

Always enter the url by hand into the browser, such as www.irs.gov as an example. These scammers wouldn’t still be doing scams like this if people weren’t falling for it, so be smart and if you have questions about emails that you get, contact the instution by phone first and verify that the email was valid.

Check The Status of Your 2008 Tax Rebate

The IRS has released a new tool that lets you check on the status of your 2008 tax rebate. For those of you that thought you should have received your rebate but didn’t, you definitely need to try this.

Click Here for the IRS Rebate Status Tool

You will need three things from your tax return to use this tool:

• Your Social Security Number
• Your Filing Status
• The number of Exemptions (Note: This is not the number of deductions)

Make sure you are accurate with these as I noticed that incorrectly putting in the number of exemptions on mine yielded an error. So if you get an error, double check a copy of the return you submitted.

Note that specific information about your Stimulus Payment will not be available until about one week before the payment is scheduled to be issued.

However if you think you should have already received yours based on the payment schedule, this tool should help.

Here is an example of mine so you can get an idea of what data you will see:


(Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture)

Hopefully this will answer a lot of your questions.

Make Money on Your Tax Rebate Stimulus Check II

Adding to my earlier post about retailers that are giving you a bonus to spend your tax rebate check with them, here are a few more:

Supervalue Inc - Bonus Information
Supervalue is giving a 10% bonus on top of your rebate amount if you exchange your rebate for gift cards to their following stores: Acme, Albertsons, bigg’s, Cub Foods, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher’s, Jewel-Osco, Lucky, Shaw’s/Star Market, Shop ‘n Save and Shoppers Food & Pharmacy.

Radio Shack - Bonus Information
Radio Shack is giving 10% off of a $50 purchase when you use your rebate check to pay for your purchase.

I imagine we are going to see more of these pop up as time goes on, but can someone answer my only question? How about us folks that are getting the rebate check direct deposited? Any bonus love for us?

Tax Rebates to Arrive Sooner Than Planned

According to the IRS, after implementing a special software program that updates records faster, they will start distributing tax rebates via direct deposit on Monday April 28th - five days earlier than expected. They didn’t say that if it is only the rebates that were supposed to be sent on May 2nd will be sent early, or if is shifts the whole Rebate Payout Schedule up a week.

Rebates to taxpayers slated to get paper checks will start to go out on May 9 - one week earlier than originally planned. Again, I am not sure if this is just those rebates from May 16th that will go out early, or if everything will be a week earlier than planned.

The IRS has not updated its Rebate Payout Schedule on their site to reflect this news, so don’t get too excited yet. I just thought I would relay this info so that for you guys getting the rebate via direct deposit, you may see a large deposit sooner than expected. So keep an eye out for it.

Leave it to the government to make last minute changes and not fully explain how it is going to work!

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