It’s a common question in online tax forums: was last year’s stimulus check a gift? Or was it a loan? When the stimulus was passed, the economic situation looked bad. Now, it looks catastrophic. Getting an extra $600 then was a nice boost, but paying back $300 now (or more, with interest) could be awful.

The good news is that nobody is going to ask you to return your stimulus payment, and the cost of it won’t be deducted from your next tax refund. But that’s only because of how fungible money is, sometimes: the cost — $300 per taxpayer, plus $300 per dependent, less some exceptions for high-income earners, but plus some other tax incentives — comes out to … Read more...

The IRS has recently announced that hundreds of thousands of stimulus and rebate checks haven’t made it to their intended recipients. You can blame out-of-date mailing addresses and social security number snafus.

Fortunately, the IRS is bending over backwards to make sure these get delivered. They’ve publicized the issue (though 383,000 wrong addresses out of over 100 million tax filers doesn’t call for much of a mea culpa), and they’ve whipped up some useful tools for curious taxpayers:

• Visit their Where’s My Refund? service for information on your refund.
• Check Where’s My Stimulus Payment? for stimulus payment data.

It’s almost inevitable that this will lead to a new a new generation of advance-fee frauds, so be on … Read more...