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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Did they give you 5% interest on the amount you overpaid?

Because that's what they take from you if you underpay (by accident or not).

Living in the US is like: "oh you were born and live in the US? We're forcing you to give us a huge chunk of your earnings for your entire working life, make it close to impossible to determine the exact amounts and then fine you 5% interest if you happen to underpay, but we'll never give you interest if you overpay.".

Edit: Well, as mentioned the tax system is super complex here and I obviously don't know the rules for every case. It seems in SOME cases you do get interest when the IRS owes you money but personally I've never seen this, where as I've always had to pay x% interest if I ever owed anything.

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Yes, the IRS will pay you interest under certain circumstances. Two examples are when they are late processing a refund or when a prior return is amended. I got a 1099-INT from the IRS in 2018. The interest rate is not 5%, however. Also, 5% is not currently the risk free rate of return.

Also, it sounds like you're referring to the penalty for underpayment, which I believe is currently 3.6% of the total underpayment for the year [0]. This only kicks in under certain circumstances.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2210.pdf

What circumstances will they pay you interest? That has never happened to me.

Because this year I got hit by some underpayment penalties (with interest added on top) but at the same time I also got a refund which had no interest applied to it.

That is being self employed and paying estimated taxes every quarter.

Once I was getting a background check in which I had to certify all my debts to the government were paid.

I realized that several years back, I had worked at a temp job for a very brief time and I probably never got a W-2 and therefore never paid taxes on it. Thus, I called up the IRS, got the W-2 information which they had, and duly filed an amended return with a check for something like $20.

However, in a rather short amount of time, I got a letter from the IRS stating that they could not accept a payment for a return more than a couple years old and here was a check for the amount, plus interest.

So I can tell you they not only pay interest on your money, but they pay it on money they are returning even though you actually owed it.

The one time when this happened to me (they thought I was ineligible for a refundable tax credit; I mailed them both a check for the amount they thought I owed and proof that I was indeed eligible for the tax credit) the IRS did actually compute and add interest to the refund check!

Sure, the gov't cashed the check and held on to the money for like two months, but the interest at the end was a pleasant surprise.

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