Tax facts on T-Day
April 17, 2000
Welcome to tax-deadline day.
More than 125 million returns are expected to be filed this year. As of March 31, 63.5 million people had already filed. About 90 percent received refunds averaging $1,668, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
The IRS also reports seeing a "record surge" in electronic filing this year. As of March 31, 29.2 million tax returns had been filed electronically - a 17 percent increase over last year.
No doubt there will be a few deadbeats. In 1997, $29.9 billion in "delinquent" taxes was collected, the IRS says. That's less than 2 percent of the $1.6 trillion in taxes it collected that year, the latest year for which complete figures are available.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society