Return to Sender

The Internal Revenue Service reports that 107,831 refund checks, worth $123.5 million, have been returned by the U.S. Postal Service because the mailing addresses on the envelopes were wrong.

Comments

[Michael Dodson]

Since the person(s) filing the return provide the return address it then falls to the IRS to mess it up or to the USPS to mess up reading it. So, you end up with a double-strike effort by the government to "help" you. Let's just go with a flat tax and I'll just mail it in -- it goes only one way, that way, so only the USPS can mess it up. A 50% improvement.

[deja moo]

People can put down their own address wrong. I keep getting the mail of a guy up the street, from all kinds of places, some I know he wants to get. He swapped digits. Maybe one of them was a refund check. If so, he didn't get it. (Neither did I, stop looking at me that way.)

[Sphynx]

While Deja Moo is correct that any human is subject to error, my experience is that the USPS public service employees (they have to pass the Civil Service exam, i.e. thier government employees) tend to make thier own mistakes at a greater frequency than the median for the population.

Anecdotally, I live in an apartment, where mail is delivered to boxes bearing the apartment #. Inside each box is a card from the USPS, listing the name(s) of each resident receiving mail at that unit. I get 1 - 5 pieces of mail a month with a correct address for someone in another unit, even with different street #. The names are not even similar to mine. Only once in 4 years have I had mail for a same building neightbor (where Street # is the same, and the Apartment # is only 1 or 2 digits different).

[Sphynx]

OOPs! Spelling error, shame on me. Part of the above should read: ...(they have to pass the Civil Service exam, i.e. they're government employees)...

[CS%]

Likely one of several ways that illegal aliens pay more than their fair share of taxes.