Many Unhappy Returns Foreseen for Tax Deadline

Harold W. Pittman knows you’re out there, all you procrastinators with your income tax returns still not mailed--maybe not even filled out.

He knows how many of you are in Orange County--about 250,000--and he knows what you’re going to do because as manager of the regional mail-sorting center in Santa Ana, he has seen it before, year after year.

Some of you will drop your returns in the mailbox as you head to work Wednesday, the deadline for filing state and federal income tax returns.

But many of you--the true brinksmen--will drive to one of the all-night post offices shortly before the clock strikes midnight. It is for you that the Postal Service is installing its special exterior safety lights, requesting police officers to control the traffic jams, and selecting its most cheerful and resilient clerks to staff the curbside mail baskets all night.

In Orange County, four post offices will remain open until midnight Wednesday to sell postage and to weigh and certify mail. Ten others, though closed for the night, will stamp April 15 postmarks onto returns slipped through their mail slots before midnight Wednesday.

Mail volume will soar that day, traditionally the busiest of the year for the U.S. Postal Service. Pittman’s sorting center, which handles about 3.5 million pieces of mail on a typical Wednesday, is expecting to handle 4.2 million this Wednesday. About 500,000 of those added pieces will be income tax returns, Pittman said.

Postal authorities expect the largest crowds to be drawn to the General Mail Facility on Sunflower Avenue between Harbor Boulevard and Fairview Road. Pittman and his crews have been preparing for that evening for more than a month.

11:20 p.m. Last Year

On that night, “you can watch people on our front steps filling out their forms,” Pittman said. “The last one last year was about 11:20 p.m.”

“We have people come in literally in curlers and bathrobes to bring their taxes in,” said Joseph Breckenridge, communications manager. “You can see them working on their calculators. It sounds like a spoof, but it’s real.”

Santa Ana police set out road flares and direct the traffic that at times chokes the surrounding streets with long lines of cars.

Eight postal clerks will be at the curb to take mail from motorists as they drive by, and four more will be kept busy wheeling away the giant postal baskets as they fill. The baskets, each the size of two refrigerators standing side-by-side, will fill at the rate of about one each 15 minutes during the peak hours of 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., Pittman said.

“We gear up with the safety of our employees utmost in our minds,” Pittman said.

What can happen to them?

“Who knows?” he said.

Well, there was the man last year who drove up to the curbside clerks and hadn’t yet finished filling out his return, recalled Jeff Vibbert, a postal worker from Santa Ana. “He got all ticked off because we asked him to move out of line and let the other cars through.”

Most Are Courteous

But by and large, the motorists are courteous, according to Sue Palaro of Santa Ana. “Mainly, it’s just moving and hauling all the time.”

Even for the last-minute taxpayers, there are tips to make the evening go better, Breckenridge said.

“The earlier, the better, of course. If you mail in the morning, your check won’t arrive but a couple of hours earlier at the Internal Revenue Service. They won’t cash it any sooner,” he said.

“And don’t try to be clever and save 22 cents. I know of people who resent the fact that they’re paying taxes, and they think they’ll stick the feds and make them pay the postage. They don’t put on a return address, thinking that will force the feds to do it.

“But both the IRS and the state refuses to pay postage due. Period. They refuse the letter, and since there’s no return address, it goes to the dead letter office, where by law it has to sit for six weeks before we can open it and find out where to send it back. This means their taxes are six or seven weeks late. They’ve shafted themselves.”

Other possible pitfalls:

- If your return is ready to mail, driving up to the curbside clerks is probably the fastest way. But don’t expect a curbside clerk to sell stamps, weigh mail or certify it. You’ll have to go into the post office for that.

- An amazing number of people hand over their returns with the envelopes unsealed, said Javier de la Torre, a postal coordinator.

- And, said Pittman, there are always people who drive back through the line and ask for their returns back “because they forgot to sign them.”

“We can’t give them back,” he said. “Technically, once you give mail to the post office it’s our property. By law, we have to deliver it to the person it’s addressed to. You have to fill out forms to get it back, and people don’t realize that.”

And what about the people who drive up one minute over the deadline and plead to have their returns accepted?

No problem, said Pittman. “I pull my people back in at 12 o’clock exactly. They can plead with the mail box all they want.”