SANTA BARBARA — With more people filing their income taxes online, fewer are mailing their returns through the U.S. Postal Service. For those last-minute filers, the Ellwood Station in Goleta will be extending its retail hours. The Ellwood Station is located at 400 Storke Road, Goleta, and will be open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday, April 15, 2013.

All other Post Offices in the Santa Barbara area will be open normal hours. Hours of operation for individual Post Offices can be found by visiting USPS.com or calling 1-800-ASK-USPS (1-800-275-8777).

Waiting until the last minute is usually not a good idea. Rushing can cause mistakes. The most common mailing errors Americans make are not including enough postage and not using 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 46 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 mailing address.
• Print your complete return address in the upper-left-hand corner of your tax mail envelope.
• Customers who wish certification that their tax return is mailed on time and received by the IRS should mail it using Certified Mail Service/Return Receipt, which is available at your local Post Office.
• While filers are encouraged to mail before April 15, if you do wait until late on Tax Day be sure to drop off your tax return mail at a Postal Service location that offers late tax mail pick-up. The Post Office located at the Santa Clarita Processing & Distribution Center, 28201 Franklin Pkwy., CA 91383 will close at 5 p.m. but collect mail until midnight on April 15.

The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.

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For reporters interested in speaking with a regional Postal Service public relations professional, please go to http://about.usps.com/news/media-contacts/usps-local-media-contacts.pdf.

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, Oxford Strategic Consulting ranked the U.S. Postal Service number one in overall service performance of the posts in the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world. 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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