DETROIT – The countdown to Tax Day 2023 is dwindling. With April 15 falling on a Saturday and a District of Columbia holiday on Monday, April 17, the tax deadline is April 18 this year.
Maysaa Rahal is a VITA program manager for Accounting Aid Society, an organization that offers tax assistance at no cost to families and individuals who have less than a $60,000 per year income. She compared services provided in 2022 to those provided in 2023 at their sites in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties.
“We’ve done 15,096 services this year, last year we did 15,000 services but by the end of tax season,” Rahal said.
She said they are expecting to help more people this year than last year.
“There’s a lot of families that feel like the high cost out there is unaffordable for them, so they just wait and wait and they don’t file taxes, but they don’t know that they’re losing,” Rahal said. “Especially with the low-income families and they have earnings, but then if they have children they’re losing a huge amount of money by not filing because we have the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit.”
She says even if you’re on social security you still need to file. Rahal warns that not filing could be an expensive mistake especially if you owe money.
“If you owe money and you don’t file, you’re causing yourself to pay penalties. You’re causing yourself to pay interest on that money that you owe,” Rahal said.
She says even if you can’t pay it’s better to file and pay as much as you can rather than to not file at all.
On a national level, Tom O’Saben of the National Association of Tax Professionals said this current filing season isn’t like the pandemic years.
“A lot of the things like the stimulus payments and the advanced child tax credits. We don’t have those this year those existed in prior years. 2022 looks a lot more like 2019,” O’Saben said.
The IRS says the most common errors on returns include missing or inaccurate social security numbers, misspelled names, and inaccurate figures for things like wages and income.
For a list of free tax help near you, visit the IRS website by clicking here.