Wang Solutions

Oh Thank Heaven! You Can Pay Income Taxes with Cash at…7-Eleven?

That’s right, you can now visit your local 7-Eleven to buy a nice cold soda, a bag of chips, a lottery ticket…and pay your income taxes. This year, the IRS and the convenience store chain will be making things more convenient for anyone who owes taxes and doesn’t have a bank account, checks, or a credit card.

In the past, any folks who wanted to pay their taxes with cold hard cash needed to travel to an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center. However, these offices can be few and far between. Now people can quite literally go just around the corner to any 7-Eleven and pay their income taxes with cash. Just remember that a 7-Eleven probably isn’t the safest place to wave around a big wad of money, so stay smart and watchful.

The option is made possible via a partnership between the IRS and ACI Worldwide’s OfficialPayments.com and the PayNearMe Company. Since most 7-Elevens are open all day every day and more than 7,000 stores are participating across the country, paying with cash is almost as easy as paying online. It does take about 5 – 7 business days to process though  — anyone trying to pay by the April 16 filing deadline will be out of luck.

Also, before taxpayers grab their greenbacks and hurry out the door, they must go online to start the payment process. Head over to the IRS.gov payments page, look for the “other ways you can pay” section, select the cash payment option, and read the instructions. You can pay up to $1,000 each time, with a $3.99 charge for each transaction. Just remember to bring extra dough with you for the donuts and coffee.

P.Ssss… Here a preview on what you need to do to pay your taxes by cash… 

Step 1

Visit the Official Payments site and follow the instructions to make a cash payment with PayNearMe.

Step 2

You’ll receive an email from Official Payments confirming your information. The IRS will then verify your information. This process may take two to three days.

Step 3

After the IRS verifies your information, PayNearMe will then send you an email with a link to your payment code and instructions. Either print the payment code at home or send it to your smartphone.

Final step

Go to the retail store listed in the PayNearMe email and ask the clerk to scan or enter your payment code. You will receive a receipt from the store after they accept your cash. This receipt is confirmation of your payment and should be kept for your records. It usually takes two business days for your payment to post to your account.

Really?!  Just write a check and be done with it!

Sufen Wang, M.S. Accountancy
www.sufenwang.com
Wang Solutions, Long Beach, CA (562) 856-0793
Editor: Hannah Huff, M.F.A. Creative Writing: Poetry, (626) 806-5805

The Tax Reform Bill Passed – Now What Happens at the IRS?

Signing a bill into law with a fancy pen is the easy part. The hard part is what follows: implementing that law efficiently and effectively. Such is the reality of the tax reform bill signed into law on Dec. 22 by President Trump.

As the agency clearly most impacted by the tax reform bill, the Internal Revenue Service will need more than a few upgrades to carry out the changes. This means things like new and improved computer systems, along with training for an expanded IRS workforce so that the agency can provide proper guidance to both tax professionals and taxpayers. Moreover, since support for the tax reform bill was garnered based on certain results claimed by its politician proponents, the agency needs to be able to enforce the law to make those claims come true.

Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen if the IRS doesn’t receive additional funding. A former IRS commissioner, Lawrence B. Gibbs, explained that the agency won’t be able to “mount a sufficient compliance effort to make sure folks obey their tax obligations under this new law” unless the agency gets more funding. As we’ve seen in the past, the IRS’s service quality ebbs and flows with its available budget.

The problem is that Republicans in Congress have a history of voting to slash the IRS budget, and things don’t look like they’re going to be changing. While talk of the IRS’s fresh new needs has begun to crop up, the word from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees isn’t promising: they’ve proposed a IRS budget in FY 2018 of $120 million less than the FY 2016 funding level. And with those changes from the tax reform law waiting in the wings without any confirmed funding increases, things aren’t looking very bright for the IRS, taxpayers, and tax preparers.