30,000 Tax Payments Lost In San Francisco Bay

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, Washington

27 September 2005

Tens of thousands of payments and other pieces of correspondence sent by taxpayers to the Internal Revenue Service have been lost after a courier vehicle transporting the items to a deposit box was involved in an accident on the San Mateo Bridge in San Francisco earlier this month, it has emerged.

According to an IRS "problem alert" statement released last Friday, about 30,000 Form 1040-ES quarterly tax payments are believed to have been lost when the courier vehicle, en route from the San Francisco post office to a check-processing facility, crashed on September 11, shedding many of the documents into the waters of the bay below. However, the IRS stated that some 15,000 documents were recovered from the accident.

A spokesman for the IRS has revealed that the agency will waive penalties and interest for anyone whose payment was lost, and it is asking people who sent mail to the PO Box 510000 in San Francisco during the first 10 days of the September to wait to see if their checks clear.

The incident could potentially affect taxpayers in as many as 13 states, including California, Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

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