SAN FRANCISCO — With more people filing their income tax returns online, fewer are mailing their returns through the U.S. Postal Service. With the decrease in demand for Postal Services at tax time, all San Francisco, Peninsula and northwest California Post Offices will be open normal hours on April 17, including the San Francisco Airport Station, which is open until midnight. Hours of operation for individual Post Offices can be found by visiting USPS.com or calling 1-800-ASK-USPS (1-800-275-8777).
Because April 15, 2012 is a Sunday and April 16 is a holiday in Washington DC, this year’s Tax Day, or the last day to file your 2011 federal and state tax return without requesting an extension, is Tuesday, April 17, 2012. All tax filers are urged to plan well in advance of April 17, or they risk missing the midnight deadline.
As a convenience for San Francisco, Peninsula and North Bay tax filers the following Postal facilities are providing curbside drop off:
San Francisco P&DC |
Airport Station |
North Bay P&DC |
Waiting until the last minute is usually not a good idea. Rushing can cause mistakes and the most common errors Americans make are not including enough postage and not providing the correct IRS mailing address. Other common mistakes according to the IRS: Social Security Numbers are wrong or left off, math errors and forgetting to attach forms and schedules, e.g., W-2s, 1099s, etc.
To help ensure a successful tax season for our customers we offer the following tax mailing tips:
- Apply proper postage and stamps, especially with extra forms/schedules. It costs 45 cents for the first ounce; 20 cents for each additional ounce. (One ounce is about four pages).
- If you use a non-IRS labeled envelope, make sure you print the proper IRS address.
- Print your return address in the upper-left-hand corner of your tax mail envelope.
- Customers who wish certification that their tax return is received by the IRS should mail it using Certified Mail Service/Return Receipt, which is available at your local Post Office.
- While encouraged to mail before April 17, if you do wait until late on Tax Day be sure to drop off your postage-paid tax return at a Postal Service location that offers late tax mail pick-up.
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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, the U.S. Postal Service was ranked number one in overall service performance, out of the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world, Oxford Strategic Consulting. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.
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