Good Excuse to Give the IRS: My Payment Fell in the Water

About 30,000 Western taxpayers who thought their checks were in the mail may soon realize that they’re actually in the bay -- the San Francisco Bay.

A truck delivering about 45,000 tax payments to a processing center in Hayward was involved in an accident on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge on Sept. 11, the Internal Revenue Service said Friday. About 15,000 were recovered on the bridge, and the rest “were ejected into the San Francisco Bay and are not recoverable,” the agency said.

Most of the checks were estimated tax payments, which many small business owners, investors and others pay the IRS every quarter.

Taxpayers in 13 Western states, including California, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon, mail their quarterly payments to a San Francisco address. The mail is then delivered by truck to the IRS facility in Hayward.

IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said the agency had no way of knowing whose payments were lost. The Hayward center handles about 2 million payments each September. The IRS plans to send notices to taxpayers who have mailed checks to that postal address in the past, he said, and advise them to check their bank statements to see whether their checks have cleared.

If a taxpayer’s check hasn’t cleared, the agency said, it will expect a replacement check within 30 days of getting the notice. The agency said it would waive penalties for anyone whose check was lost in the bay, but, in case you were wondering, not indefinitely.