If you looked closely enough yesterday, you could almost see the tumbleweeds blowing through the post office across from Internal Revenue Service headquarters at Massachusetts Avenue and North Capitol Street.
"I haven't seen a line all day," said IRS spokesman Sam Serio, who sneaked out of his office a few times to grab a smoke. It was the deadline to file federal, state and local taxes, and there should have been a mob of frantic filers outside. "In all prior years, I have seen 200 to 300 people," he said. This year, he said, he'd seen only two or three at a time, lamenting the absence of what IRS veterans call the "procrastinators' parade."
At the Clarendon Post Office, Franklin Villalobos, originally from El Salvador, addresses his tax returns. At left is his father, Jose Antonio Villalobos.
(Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
|
|
The Information Age has finally caught up with the medieval custom of levying taxes on the citizenry. For the first time since the government started offering electronic filing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is a chance that more than half the country's taxpayers will file their returns over the Internet.
As of Monday, Serio said, 51.8 million out of 89.4 million federal tax returns had been filed electronically, a 12 percent increase over last year. State tax agencies, too, reported that e-filing was on the rise. In Maryland, 879,000 out of 1.8 million returns had been filed electronically, with the biggest increase among senior citizens. In Virginia, the figure was 1.2 million out of 2.5 million, and in the Internet-savvy District, where Serio was gazing at the near-vacant post office, 71,227 tax returns had been filed electronically vs. 45,627 on paper.
The numbers shift significantly in the week before the deadline, when 30 percent of tax returns are filed. People who owe taxes, rather than expect a refund, tend to file returns on paper, Serio said. They also tend to be the last ones to file -- 82 percent of the federal returns that had been filed before Monday were from people who were receiving refunds.
And more likely than not, they wound up at post offices, where the tradition of tax day chaos and celebration lived on across the region.
To ease the crunch at the downtown Frederick post office, a kind of procrastination station was set up in the lobby. For those needing more time to file, there was a stack of IRS Form 4868s and a stack of Maryland Form 502E's.
"People want to make sure you stamp them. They want to see them go in the box," said Cindy Fowler, a postal employee who was answering questions and stamping envelopes.
Outside the Clarendon Post Office in Arlington last night, a blues band played and belly dancers performed. About 50 people milled about, easily outnumbering the 15 or so people tending to business inside the post office.
"This is for the people who, on April 15, it's usually a traumatic event,'' said Sona Virdi of the Clarendon Alliance, which sponsored the mini-festival. "If you're going to have a party, why not now?"
Salesman Mike Giroux's trip to the post office yesterday to mail his taxes was meant to last all of 25 seconds. So there he was, half an hour before a 3 p.m. meeting, stopping at the Rockville Post Office. Standing next to the mailboxes outside the front door, he opened his briefcase, pulled out his tax returns and opened the box's blue mouth.
And as he dropped in the envelope and double-checked its progress down the chute, "I noticed I didn't have stamps on it."
"Aaaaah," he groaned quietly as he watched his taxes in their useless envelope descend into the box. He would have to brave the post office. So he walked inside, where one window was open and six people were already ahead of him.
By the time Giroux got to the front, he had 10 minutes to spare before his meeting. Then he was told that the clerk didn't have the key to the mailbox but that he could call the main post office, or wait until the postal carrier came to empty the box "around 5."
"What an idiot!" Giroux grumbled. He muttered another couple choice descriptions of the situation, then added, "I hate to have to just sit around here. And -- just sit."
For Michael A. Walsh, a spokesman for the Maryland Office of the Comptroller, Giroux's predicament showed why e-filing is becoming the rule rather than the exception.
"One of the best things about e-filing is that there's no mistakes," Walsh said. According to the IRS, 16 percent to 20 percent of printed applications have errors; the error rate on electronic applications is less than 1 percent, because the computer does the math.
The arithmetic wasn't so great for the U.S. Postal Service, which would have gotten at least 37 cents from each of those 51.8 million federal returns that were instead sent over the Internet. That's a total of at least $14 million.
The news made George Olsen, the postmaster in Annapolis, shake his head.
"We believe you should mail your tax return certified," he said earnestly.
Staff writers Elaine Rivera, Fredrick Kunkle and Avis Thomas-Lester contributed to this report.
