$95,000 in undelivered refunds and stimulus checks for Napa County residents.
By JENNIFER HUFFMAN Register Business Writer
The IRS wants to find more than one hundred Napa County residents, but they shouldn’t be alarmed. It’s good news.
According to the agency, 124 locals are owed almost $95,000 in undelivered IRS refund checks.
Economic stimulus checks totaling nearly $45,500 and regular refund checks totaling nearly $50,000 were returned as undeliverable by the post office, said IRS spokesman Jesse Weller.
To help track these Napa County residents down, the agency has provided a list of the lucky 124.
If someone finds his or her name on the list, they only need to call the IRS and update his or her address and get their payment.
But it may prove difficult to locate many of the taxpayers. Attempts by the Register to contact a dozen from the list brought results with only two names. While neither wanted to be identified for this story out of concern for their privacy or to fend off would-be scam artists, each was happy to find out they were due a check from the government.
One person on the list is an elderly woman who recently moved from her Napa home into a retirement community. She was unaware she had missed a payment from the IRS.
“I’m excited,” said the woman. “I’d like to know how to get my check.”
She remembered her friends getting their stimulus payments, but she never got hers.
“I never found out why. I just forgot about it,” said the woman, who is 77.
Another man on the list, who had a Yountville address, guessed his check got lost when he changed his address in 2008.
A stimulus payment of $600 would be nice, but not life changing.
“In this day and age $600 doesn’t go very far,” said the 62-year-old. “The government just spent $700 billion bailing out the banks. $600 is just a drop in the bucket.”
There’s a deadline to get the checks resent. Residents with undelivered stimulus checks need to update their addresses with the IRS by Nov. 28, according to Weller.
By law, economic stimulus checks must be sent out by Dec. 31. And the money’s nothing to sneeze at.
The undeliverable economic stimulus checks average $583. Regular refund checks returned to the IRS average $988.
“We want to send this money to taxpayers as soon as possible,” said Weller. “It is more urgent this year for taxpayers to update their address with the IRS because of the year-end cut-off for stimulus payments.”
More than $34.4 million in returned checks came from Californians, with nearly $5.1 million from the Bay Area. More than 4,000 economic stimulus checks totaling about $2.4 million and more than 2,500 regular refund checks totaling about $2.7 million were returned as undeliverable from the nine-county Bay Area.
