As the title reads, I made a pretty stupid mistake. It has taken a while for the IRS to issue me a refund. Today I finally checked the website and it showed that they deposited this yesterday. I login to my BoA account and its not there yet. At this point an internal red flag goes off.

So I proceed to review my 1040 and find out that I transposed my account number. Instead of 816498** I put 816489** so you can imagine that the refund is no where near my account.

A quick call to Bank of America and they indeed show a deposit for the refund amount WITH my name on it (literally, the direct deposit actually includes your name) on that bogus bank account. Yes that is after all the problem. The account number that I have given is not a real account. Since this happened on a Friday, it hasn’t been declared wrong and returned to the IRS. If it had been a real account the rep had simply transferred the funds to my account number.

Now I have to call first thing (the customer service rep insisted on calling as early as possible) on Monday at 8am before their ACH department opens up. She said that she can’t guarantee a resolution (which tells me I have about 10% chance of this working) but that the earlier I call the better as they can stop the bounce back to the IRS and still route it to my account. If they can’t help me, I have to contact the IRS and most likely wait an additional 6 weeks (according to their website in situations like this).

The lesson to be learned here? Quadruple check your 1040 if your sending it out especially if your planning to do direct deposit.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under general, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.