Tax Filing Sites

469 tax filing sites

These days, the most common sites for filing federal income tax returns are the official Internet Revenue Service website at www.irs.gov and that old standby the post office, where hordes of people still gather at the 11th hour of April 14 to try and get their returns postmarked before they turn into late-filing pumpkins at midnight.

That said, there are many other places where you can dump your forms into the chopper -- oops, did we say chopper? I'm sure we meant hopper. In any case, you can drop your forms off at any Internal Revenue Service office or, if you have your tax returns processed by one of the numerous major tax preparation services whose storefronts are major revenue producers for strip mall landlords throughout the United States, have them perform the electronic filing service for you.

Wherever -- and for that matter, whenever -- you file your tax return it will eventually wind up at the Internal Revenue Service regional processing center nearest the address listed on the return. Once there it will, in the case of almost all gainfully employed individual and married taxpayers, be computer scanned for obvious errors -- like two and two being added and reported as five or certain details being written on the wrong line on the form -- and outlandish. potentially dishonest claims (like someone with an income of $18,000 a year claiming 137,452.23 in business travel expenses.

If the computer finds nothing wrong, it shuffles the return off to another computer which processes the payment received with the return or prepares and authorizes a tax refund depending on the situation.

If the initial automated tax examiner (aka the bloody computer) doesn't like something on the return or discovers that tax is reported as owed but no money has been received, it will "red flag" the return and file it at the end of a gigantic queue of files waiting to be analyzed by human examiners. Or, if the discrepancies, contradictions and generally unsavory nature of the return in question seem egregious, the computer can mainline it right to the head of the awaiting human intervention queue.

Moral of the story? The content of any federal income tax return is far more important than where it was filed.