IRS Spanish Booklet Has Wrong Table : Taxes: Overpayments could reach $373 per return. But officials say computers will find the error and automatically refund the money.

On the eve of the tax filing deadline, the Internal Revenue Service discovered a mistake in one of its Spanish-language handbooks that could cause taxpayers to overpay Uncle Sam up to $373.

Inadvertently, the 1990 tax tables were put into the handbook instead of the 1991 tables, said IRS spokesman Don Roberts in Washington. The more current tables are adjusted for the rising cost of living and list lower tax rates.

About 50,000 copies of the handbook were distributed nationwide, Roberts said. IRS officials added, however, that taxpayers who used the handbook, titled Publication 579S, should not worry; any overpayment will be caught by the agency’s computers and refunded.

Ann Logan, spokeswoman at the IRS district office in Laguna Niguel, which serves most of Southern California, said the agency was alerted to the mistake only Tuesday.

“We got a telephone call from a taxpayer who wanted to know why there was a discrepancy” between the tax tables in the English handbook and those in the Spanish one, she said.

Those affected by the mistake are single people with taxable income of at least $19,450, married couples filing jointly with taxable income of at least $32,450 and married people filing separately with income of at least $16,250. The faulty tax schedule only tracks incomes up to $50,000.

Generally, the higher the taxable income, the greater the potential overpayment if the faulty tax table is used. For instance, married people filing separately with income of $16,250 would overpay the federal government by only $7. But a couple filing separately with income of $49,950 would overpay by $373.

IRS officials said they have no way of knowing how many people used the outdated tables. They said the Spanish handbooks are not automatically sent to taxpayers but must be ordered or picked up at IRS counters.

Now that the IRS is aware of the problem, Logan said, it has passed on the information to its workers who counsel the public on the telephone or at walk-in offices.

“This publication does not have a wide distribution. It is not heavily requested,” Roberts said. “It is considered a small number when you figure we have 114 million people filing returns.”

Several tax services that deal with Spanish-speaking clients said they were unaffected by the mistake because their computers use the correct version of the IRS tax tables.

“I think it would be rare for a person that does not speak any English to do their own taxes at home,” said Frank Palmer, owner of Palmer Income Tax Service in Santa Ana, whose clientele is about 95% Spanish-speaking.