Daily Report: The Earliest Bird, But Still No Worm

I got my taxes done today. Intuit's online TurboTax is fabulous. It remembered everything from last year, and had about 90% of my federal and state returns finished before I even logged in. It took 10 minutes... mostly of waiting for pages to load so I could click "no change".

I actually was trying to be the first person to file his tax return in America. When my final 2008 pay totals were posted at the company's online employee resource site just before Christmas, I went straight to TurboTax and filled out all the forms. However, when I tried to send the stuff in, the program said my return couldn't be dated before January first. It asked me if I wanted to change the date of the return manually, but I figured that somebody at the IRS holding a tax return on December 27 that was dated January 1 might consider that lying on one's tax return, I took a pass and put everything on hold.

But on the morning of New Year's Day, I was back on TurboTax hitting the send button again. This time it said, "Sorry, we're not open for business until January 7th." I hit the send button again on January 7th. "Sorry, we're not open for business until 9:00 tonight."

Finally, at 1:00 a.m. on January 8th (yes, I was able to muster up at least that much patience... 4 hours), I hit the send button for a final time. "Thanks for submitting, but the IRS doesn't start processing tax forms until January 16th, and it takes 2 days to do that... but 8 to 14 days after that you'll have your refund."

So, for all of you who have never tried: Currently, the earliest one could conceivably receive their U.S. tax refund would be January 24th, but more likely around January 28th to February 1st.

And that's if there are no problems: Last year, my tax return was rejected because the electronic signature (a numerical value equal to one's bottom-line income from the prior year) cannot be "0"... which, with the overseas tax credit, mine was... and is again. We'll see what happens this year; I'm not optimistic, but at least I'll know if there's a problem nice and early.