CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Some patient or not so patient West Virginians will be getting their state refund checks over the next few days.
State Revenue Secretary Dave Hardy says a batch of refunds went out Monday. He said all that’s left now are 8,500 paper returns that remain under review.
“Those are still being held pending error review, potential fraud review or missing documents,” Hardy said Monday on MetroNews “Talkline.”
The state Tax Department ran into a problem in early April when the new scanner machine it purchased to help process paper returns malfunctioned. Hardy said they put a team together to put the information from those 117,000 returns in by hand. He said working six days a week they were able to have all of the information entered within six weeks. Since then the returns have been processed and refund checks mailed out.
“Ninety-seven percent of the tax returns have been processed and completed and there’s three percent left,” Hardy said.
Hardy said a lot of the 8,500 returns still being held didn’t submit W-2 forms, a requirement by the state for the first time this year.
“This year we did require it and a lot of returns came in that didn’t have the W-2. So that would fall under the missing documents,” Hardy said.
.@DaveHardyWV joins @HoppyKercheval to discuss the delay with state income tax returns, and how much of a delay there was. WATCH: https://t.co/wkudfIAoe1 pic.twitter.com/oRr7Zedxec
— MetroNews (@WVMetroNews) July 8, 2019
Those with returns under review should have been notified or will be soon.
Hardy said the state wrote nearly 506,000 refund checks for $196 million. He said unfortunately the new scanning machine didn’t work correctly to help process the paper returns.
“Obviously we’re not very happy about that and it put a lot of strain on a lot of good people at Tax (Department). We had teams of people in there working overtime, all hours of the day and night, to catch it up,” Hardy said.
Anyone with a question about their return is asked to call 304-558-3333.