Come the middle of April, a lot of people will be sitting around the house not-so-patiently waiting for a check in the mail from the IRS so they can go spend it on a new Margaritaville margarita mixer or some similarly brilliant investment.
Chew your fingernails no more, patient taxpayer — you can check the status of your refund on the IRS’ brand new mobile application! Predictably, it’s got a very fancy and very awesome name: “IRS2Go.”
Or not. Whatever, at least it’s easy to use.
First, taxpayers enter a Social Security number, which is masked and encrypted for security purposes. Next, taxpayers pick the filing status they used on their tax return. Finally, taxpayers enter the amount of the refund they expect from their 2010 tax return.
I downloaded it a few minutes ago and, frankly, it’s pretty awesome.
Not “Angry Birds” awesome or anything, but it’s a simple-to-use, lightweight application that takes about two seconds to download.
The app is what’d you expect too: bland, efficient and just cold/evil-feeling enough to make you wonder what the hell that helicopter is doing up in the sky.
“Bonuses” outside of tracking include the ability to follow the IRS on Twitter (those guys are so full of jokes), an optional sign-up for tax updates (go ahead and give the government your email address, by all means) and a contact page.
That last one’s actually pretty handy, because it has “Call” buttons that let you dial into the Internal Revenue Service hotlines with a press of your thumb.
As for the refund tracking itself, well, I haven’t filed my taxes so I’m not sure just how well it works by they’re looking for a social security number — encrypted security, hopefully better than whatever the hell Amazon is using — a filing status and a refund amount.
When I tried entering in my social, my status and a fictional amount, I just got a “you entered something incorrectly.” Of course, I haven’t filed my taxes yet (don’t worry, I’ve got a good three months!) so it would be impossible to track. But if you have filed your taxes and test out the app, let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@willbrinson) whether or not you had to be spot-on with the amount to get a tracker. Also worth noting is that there’s a lag of about 72 hours from when the IRS says they’ve received your taxes to your ability to track it. So don’t get your panties in a bunch if you mailed them yesterday and the government’s not listening to you.
Really, the only bad thing about the App is that it doesn’t have a better welcome screen. You know, something like this:
Via the OC Register