Countywide : Post Offices to Begin Delivering Tax Forms

For most people, it’s a piece of mail they dread receiving, especially during the holidays.

So for the past three years, the Internal Revenue Service has been nice enough to wait until the new year to send out tax forms.

The annual mailing flurry, however, began in mid-December when the IRS sent its first bulk of packages to Orange County’s post offices as well as to post offices nationwide.

It’s a mass mailing that the United States Postal Service described as one of its biggest of the year.

With 109 million taxpayers nationwide, the IRS must send out 86 million tax forms, plus an additional 23 million postcards to those who use tax preparers already stocked with tax forms.

To ensure that tax forms can start being delivered by Jan. 3, the IRS mailed the forms to local post offices weeks ahead time.

“We have been receiving booklets since the mid-part of December, zip code by zip code, but the instructions are to not deliver them before the third of January,” said Bob Gillis, plant manager at the Orange County Processing and Distribution Center.

Orange County alone will receive 1 million tax-form packages. All tax forms are sent to the Processing and Distribution Center in Santa Ana and are then shipped off and stored in each city’s post offices.

Until a few years ago, tax forms arrived in mailboxes right around Christmas, but now the delivery date falls on the day after the new year begins. This year it is Jan. 3 because of the observed Monday holiday, said Santa Ana Postmaster Rosemarie Fernandez.

“Three years ago, the IRS used to deliver the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day,” said Fernandez. “We speculate that the IRS changed its delivery dates because it didn’t want to be sending out tax forms during the holidays.”

The tax form package includes the 1040 and 1040A tax forms, tax tables, tax rate schedules, an instruction booklet and basic schedules and attachments required to report certain income and expenses.

For the first time, the package also will include customer service standards that explain how IRS employees are instructed to deal with customers, said Keith Kimball, public affairs specialist in the IRS district office in Los Angeles.