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The IRS says the Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) will be the most wide-reaching refund in IRS history - more than 160 million filers may request it.

What Is The Telephone Excise Tax Refund?

It is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return. It is designed to refund previously collected long distance telephone taxes. Individuals, businesses and tax-exempt organizations are eligible to request it.

Individual Refund Claims

Taxpayers have 2 choices

1. Claim a standard refund amount between $30 and $60, based on the total number of exemptions claimed on their 2006 tax return. The benefit of this option is that you don’t need to locate old phone bills (who keeps them?).
2. If you can locate those bills you can use the actual amount.

For option 1 the standard refund amount, there is an extra line on your tax returns for the refund.

For option 2 where you have the old phone bills, you can figure the refund using the actual amount of tax paid. In this case you need to fill out Form 8913, Credit for Federal Telephone Excise Tax Paid, and attach it to your return.

It might seem hard to believe, but the IRS has unclaimed refunds for 95,746 taxpayers because their checks could not be delivered!

The average refund payment is $963 for each of the 95,746 taxpayers (worth a total of $92.2 million!) whose refund checks have been returned to the Internal Revenue Service as undeliverable, because a taxpayer has moved without notifying the IRS or Postal Service of a change of address.

The checks can be claimed as soon as their taxpayer owners update their addresses with the IRS. In some cases, a taxpayer has more than one check waiting.

If you think you are missing your check, the IRS is working hard to make it easier than ever for taxpayers to update their information and claim their refunds by using the “Where’s My Refund?” feature on the home page of the IRS.gov Web site.

To use the feature and find out the status of your refund(s), enter your Social Security number, filing status (such as single or married filing jointly) and the refund amount shown on the your 2005 tax return.

When the information is submitted, “Where’s My Refund?” will display the status of a refund and, in some cases, provide instructions on how to resolve potential account issues.

Taxpayers can also access a telephone version of “Where’s My Refund?” by calling 1-800-829-1954.

Find information to help you get a tax refund

“The government has significantly curtailed welfare in the United States, and minimum wage is far too often the norm for many hard working unskilled Americans. The government has provided a financial windfall or tax credit as it is called to make up for the huge disparity between low-income wage earners and the high cost of living in the United States. The problem is, many pople dont understand how they can get money back on their taxes they never paid in the first place, so many still do not benefit from the earned income tax credit and millions of dollars sit in the federal government coffers, unused. ”

Read the rest of this article to find out how you can claim your Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).