You must have filed by April 15, 2013 in order to claim your 2009 tax refund.
$917 million. That’s how much money in 2009 refunds was just sitting in the Treasury waiting to be claimed.
The IRS announced that there were an estimated 984,000 people who didn’t claim their 2009 refunds. That’s an average refund of $932 per person! If that’s your money don’t let it go to waste.
You can still get your 2009 refund, but not for much longer. You must file your 2009 return by April 15, 2013 in order to receive it.
According to the statute of limitations, you have three years after a return’s original due date to file and still get a refund. After three years you can still file, but you won’t see any money. Your refund now belongs to the Treasury.
Unfortunately you can’t e-file prior year returns, but you can still prepare them online. RapidTax allows you to prepare any return online going back to 2005 just as you would your current year return. The only difference is that at the end of the process instead of e-filing you’ll need to print your return out, sign it, and mail it to the IRS.
Many of the people who hadn’t claimed their 2009 refund weren’t legally required to file a return because their incomes fell beneath the filing thresholds. For 2009 the thresholds were $9,350 for single filers and $18,700 for married filing jointly.
If your income for 2009 was below these levels, you aren’t required to file. If you were still able to claim a refund and taxes were withheld from your paychecks throughout that year, then it would be smart for you to file. At this point, the deadline has come and gone for you to claim that money so you can opt out of filing.
Why should you still file your 2009 tax return?
One would assume that would be the next question. To put it into simplest terms, I’ll give you a common example:
Let’s say you are planning on filing your 2012 tax return this year. You know are still able to claim a refund for this year since it hasn’t hit that three-year mark yet so you prepare your return and mail it to the IRS. Some time passes and you start to wonder where your refund could be so you call the IRS to track it down. You finally get a representative on the line, they access your 2012 return and let you know that your refund money is being held because you never filed your 2009 return…
Don’t let this happen to you. File your 2009 return on RapidTax now.
Photo via Ben Husmann on Flickr.
