IRS Sends 1040 Packets With Misprinted Address Labels
In another embarrassing snafu, the Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday that it sent out a million 1040 tax return packages with erroneous bar codes on the return mailing labels.
If taxpayers try to use the labels, they will probably find their completed returns delivered to their own doorsteps rather than to the IRS, the agency said.
The setback comes after more than two years of effort to improve IRS customer service and correct long-standing problems with the agency’s antiquated technology.
Separately, the IRS said Tuesday that its highly regarded technology chief, Arthur Gross, is resigning after only two years on the job.
Gross said in a statement he is leaving because he had accomplished much of what he set out to do, but a string of technology and customer service errors in the last six months suggests that the agency remains troubled.
An internal audit last year found that the agency had lax telephone security practices in dealing with confidential taxpayer information. And in August, the agency acknowledged sending 90,000 erroneous warnings to taxpayers involving tax reporting for domestic employees.
Ironically, the mailing labels in the latest IRS setback were part of an agency initiative to save money. In the past, addresses and bar codes were printed directly on the return envelopes the IRS sends with its tax packages.
But to cut costs, the agency elected to use peel-off labels that taxpayers could stick on blank envelopes. (A second peel-off label in the 1040 tax package that is applied to the 1040 tax return form itself is not in error.)
The erroneous labels carry bar codes with the ZIP Code of the taxpayer, rather than of the IRS service center that is to receive the tax return. Postal equipment would probably route the envelopes back to the sender, even though the rest of the IRS address is correct, an agency spokesman said.
The error involves two categories of 1040 tax return packages mailed to taxpayers on the East and West coasts. The packages contain the designation 1040-5 and 1040-10 on the back of the outgoing envelope.
Taxpayers can also determine whether they received an erroneous tax package by comparing the bar code on the label with their own address on the envelope they receive from the IRS. The bar codes should not look the same.
The agency is mailing new address labels to taxpayers, though the spokesman said taxpayers could use the bad labels by simply crossing out the bar code with a black pen.
IRS officials said the error was caused by a printing contractor.
“The expectation is that the contractor is going to have to eat the cost of mailing out the new labels,” an agency spokesman said.
