In Brief: Phone Tax Headache Continues

Only time will tell whether the bane of the 2006 tax filing year for the Internal Revenue Service is the scam-prone telephone tax refund, or the confusion that seems destined to arrive soon surrounding a number of extender provisions that were not included on the agency's original forms.The agency urged taxpayers to check and see if they qualify for the telephone excise tax refund after more than 10 million early filers did not request the one-time refund. In the first release of the year's weekly filing season statistics, about 30 percent of all taxpayers had not requested the telephone tax refund. Nearly half of those returns - more than 4.8 million - were completed by a tax preparer. "We are surprised how many tax preparers are overlooking the telephone tax refund," said IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, in a statement.