Every year clients ask us this question:
I paid my tax via IRS Direct Pay (or you had my account debited). Why hasn’t my payment come out yet?
The answer to this question is simple, and there’s nothing your tax professional can do about it. The IRS can only handle so many debits a day, so many payments made for April 15th will happen in the days following April 15th. Taxpayers need to allow up to ten business days for their payment to post. It’s usually much less, but we’ve seen it take that long.
We also get this question:
Why hasn’t my New Jersey payment gone through? You filed my return on April 15, and the IRS debited my account but New Jersey has not.
For whatever reason, New Jersey is by far the slowest state in the country to accept tax returns and extensions. This morning, I have a list of eight New Jersey returns and extensions filed on April 15th that were accepted! Some of these include payments initiated by us; others are returns with refunds or zero balances. Yet these returns were not accepted until–at the earliest–Saturday, four days after being filed. There’s nothing we or any other tax professional can do about New Jersey’s slow as molasses system.
The good news here is that a payment initiated on April 15th is considered made on April 15th even if it is accepted days later (this is true for the IRS and New Jersey).
