It’s that time of the year again: The Rockies begin their season with hope, daffodils emerge to signal the end of winter, and tax returns are due.
Because of the vagaries of the calendar and a holiday in Washington, D.C., taxpayers will enjoy a two-day reprieve this year. State and federal returns are due on Tuesday, April 17. That’s good news if you’re one of those procrastinators who labors to the last-minute calculating deductions and obscure energy credits.
The Internal Revenue Service expects to receive 135 million returns this spring and through mid-March had already received fully half of them, according to the website Bankrate.com. Colorado expects to process 2.1 million returns, with 892,609 in hand by March 23, said Roxy Huber, executive director of the state Department of Revenue.
Some taxpayers dally because they owe money to the government and don’t want to pay until the last moment. Others labor under the belief that they’re more likely to escape the dreaded audit if they file during the deadline rush. (Not so, says the IRS. Red flags are just that, and suspicious returns will get attention no matter when they are filed.)
In recent months, the U.S. Treasury outlined a strategy for bridging the “tax gap,” which is the amount of taxes the government believes it ought to be collecting versus what it collects from people who voluntarily pay.
According to the IRS, the gap was $345 billion in 2001, the most recent year for which it has an estimate. The biggest single source of missing taxes, $197 million, came from underreported income. The IRS intends to fine-tune its effort to catch unintentional errors and pinpoint other sources of noncompliance.
If an increasingly aggressive IRS isn’t enough of a threat for those thinking about fudging numbers, perhaps the condemnation of their friends and neighbors would be. According to a poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of those surveyed consider cheating on taxes to be morally wrong, second only to cheating on one’s spouse.
So, before the spring flowers fade and the Rockies assume their traditional place in the basement of the National League West, the wise plan is to finish up that tax return with care and accuracy.
