What Happens to Your Tax Return After the Check Goes in the Mail?
DAVID HAFFENREFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Before you know it your 1999 income tax will be due. You fill out the forms, you write a check, you send it all in -- but what happens next? CNN news source's Keith Oppenheim joins me now at this early hour for a special look at the IRS processing center in Ogden, Utah. Good morning, Keith.</s>KEITH OPPENHEIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, David. And we're give you a behind the scenes look at this processing center in Ogden, and it's our way of trying to demystify how your tax return is actually handled. We have a number of live cameras posted throughout this massive facility, a building that covers, like, 10 acres and has about something like 6,500 employees during the peak April crunch time. The mail operation that you're looking at here, they take in about 82,000 pieces of mail on average per day, David, although that goes up to 6.7 pieces of mail during those critical April weeks. And what we're going to do right now is give you a sense of the sometimes-complicated adventure a tax return can make.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We can process on our incoming. We process about 650,000 in a 24-hour time frame.</s>OPPENHEIM: Then all the envelopes go to what's known as the "Tingle tables," named after an IRS employee who created an ideal desk for sorting, sorting which, the IRS says, is done more effectively by humans than by machines.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There's too many checks and balances, too many things that the extractors watch for that they can identify right up front.</s>OPPENHEIM: The simpler EZ forms are scanned and checked for errors. Some EZs and all the more complex returns go to a place called "document perfection," where examiners are looking for problems like missing signatures, schedules and Social Security numbers. If documents are complete, they go to data entry, the process of converting paper returns into the IRS database -- no easy task for each operator.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We would approximately do around 350 documents a day, and that would equate to about 50 documents an hour, around 9,000 keystrokes per hour.</s>OPPENHEIM: In the end, the checks are checked to make sure the amount paid is the same as the amount on the return. Last year, this machine handled plenty of revenue.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And on our busiest day, it was April 26th, we did $1.1 billion.</s>OPPENHEIM: Back live now with a view of the Tingle tables, where humans work a little bit more efficiently than machines would. But speaking of machines, the IRS wants folks to file more and more electronically. Last year, David, about 15 percent of taxpayers did e-filing, about 4 percent used a telephone system, but 81 percent did the traditional thing; they filed by paper. And the IRS is trying to change those proportions toward e-filing. Back to you in New York.</s>HAFFENREFFER: All right, thank you, Keith. And certainly those e-filings will save on a lot of keystrokes, I imagine.</s>OPPENHEIM: That's right. Search CNN.com CNNSI.com CNNmoney.com The Web