[prepend]

> They should also send refunds to people that overpay.

They do. I’ve gotten checks from the IRS before, sometimes years later.

> counting their own time

This is not a good idea as my time is $1jillion/hour so the government owes me.

Seriously though, our time is factored into the standard deduction.

[wahern]

I've also received checks several times. I've never cashed them, though; I have no idea what the correction was for, and the little paranoid, anti-authoritarian, legally illiterate conspiracy theorist sitting on my shoulder tells me a few bucks isn't worth the risk of falling for the IRS's clever entrapment scheme--because cashing a check can in theory constitute affirmation of the correction, which could have been erroneous for all know, and thus with some handwaving constitute fraudulent affirmation.

In reality the Federal IRS is a paper tiger compared to the California Franchise Tax Board. The FTB will shoot and ask questions later, and that's more than figurative if not quite literal. The FTB once garnished a paycheck while I was in the middle of correspondence with them.

From first person anecdotes I've heard, some other state tax authorities are similarly ruthless. My father got screwed out of a significant sum (in working-class terms) when Alabama came after him on the basis of some fraudulent 1099s (inflated payment amounts) from when he was a construction contractor. He had already moved to another state and it had been many years since the fraudulently reported income, making it infeasible to fight as it would cost too much to collect enough evidence to rebut Alabama's claim. While the Cal FTB has made national headlines a few times, most state services never make national headlines, so everybody just assumes the IRS are the bad guys, when in reality I think the IRS are relative softies.

[q845712]

the CA FTB is the only tax agency thus far to ever send me a letter disagreeing with what I had filed. The gist of it was that I had made a multi-decimal-place error on one paycheck when requesting extra withholding, and then left it still too big by an order of magnitude after I tried to correct it (b/c the year before i had owed them ~$4k and I prefer the psychological feeling of getting a small refund) which resulted in getting a refund so large I triggered some automatic "this must be a mistake" audit.

I had slightly complicated taxes that year and actually called them and spoke to someone who helped narrow down the number of forms I needed to dig up and submit to just a single form from one employer, and confirmed that it was due to the above withholding anomaly. I sent that form and a couple months later they sent me a letter indicating that my original number was basically correct. for some reason they preferred a number that was lower by a few dollars and I really didn't care, so I happily cashed the refund check (which was for several $k (IIRC between $5-10k, which i did care about).

The next year I had to file an extra form - apparently FTB had held my refund for long enough that when they sent it back to me they also paid me interest on my refund, and I had to file for taxes on that interest...