I submitted my taxes on February 17th, and for the next two weeks, I checked the Where’s My Refund? tool provided by the IRS. But about 2 weeks after submitted my tax refund, it finally said that my refund was processed and approved. Great, right?
The thing is that while I thought I was getting a $2,955 refund (yay for getting married and filing a joint tax return for the first time), the IRS only approved a $2,745 refund. Where did that $210 go? Where was my explanation?
It’s been over 4 weeks now, and I expected to get a letter in the mail from the IRS explaining what happened. But now I’m going to have to contact them. Which I’m sure will be very easy now that we’re just weeks away from the April 15th tax filing deadline. Nobody else will have questions, right?
I tried to think of any reason why the IRS would take out $210 from my refund. At a 25% rate, that means that they found $840 in income that they think I did not report. That’s a lot more than just a slight oversight!
I am brutally honest with my taxes and try to report any and all income I earned during the year. However, I did find about $85 from a 1099 that I had not accounted for from an investment funds account I no longer use.
You can’t hide income reported on 1099 forms from the IRS. When, in this case, a bank sends you a 1099 form, they send the same one to the IRS. So if you don’t report it to the IRS, it’s glaringly obvious.
But that $85 was only a small fraction of the unaccounted for funds that the IRS thinks I did not include in my tax return.
I did some research and found information about IRS notices and letters. There are lots of reasons (210 options, according to their website) why you might get a letter from the IRS. For my situation, it would likely be the CP20 Notice, which you receive when the IRS believes “you incorrectly claimed one or more deductions or credits. As a result, your refund is less than you expected.”
So for now, I just wait. I already expected to receive some communication from the IRS, but now I’m going to have to try and seek out the information myself. I will definitely be following up with another post when I find out what was the issue was!