IRS Payment Alternatives for Dummies

1040 ES voucher

When you come right down to it, the main reason most of our awardees are nominated in the first place is that they had no idea what they were talking about (but talked about it anyway). In many cases, this ignorance is sort of second-hand: the people asking questions knew so little about the topic they couldn't even formulate a proper question. The eHow.com model was to scrape search-engine queries for their contributors to "answer," a recipe for disaster given their stable of writers... writers like Pamela Gardapee, who tackled "How to Make IRS Payments" for PocketSense.com.¹

Gardapee, as befits someone with no idea what she's talking about, blathered for more than two hundred words about how to submit payment to the IRS in your annual filing. According to Pamela, you can pay with a check, credit card, or even cash. That last seemed unlikely, so we checked. Although Pam says to,

"Visit your local IRS office to pay in cash. Cash... must be given to a worker at the IRS office."

That's at best out of date and at worst, wrong. The IRS contracts with local 7-11 stores in a system called "Pay Near Me." You can't pay in cash at "your local IRS office" – you can't even find them most of the time. Yes, some, but not all, Taxpayer Assistance Centers take cash; but that's not an "IRS office,"

Gardapee's out-of-date and often clumsy suggestions, however, are very likely not the purpose of the OQ's question. After all, how to send money to the IRS is made quite clear in their instruction booklets and on the various 1040 forms (all that Pam addresses). It's highly likely that the OQ had heard about making quarterly payments: you know, for all that freelancing contract cash? In that case, Gardapee's answer most certainly should have included a reference to IRS Form 1040-ES, Estimated Tax for Individuals. This includes not only a form for calculating taxes owed, but vouchers for the four quarterly payments needed to avoid paying a penalty at the end of the year.

As someone "functional in finances" who offers "her tax... services to others," Gardapee most certainly should have been aware of Form 1040-ES. Hell, the woman should have filled several out over her "seven years [sic] experience." But she didn't mention it, which means she's our Dumbass of the Day... again.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   /pocketsense.com/irs-tax-payments-4829603.html

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