| You received a certain type of income during the year, and you know that you should be getting some type of form in the mail from the payer in order to prepare your federal income tax return. You wait and you wait, but your mailbox is filled with nothing but after-Christmas sale flyers. You really wanted to file early this year and get your refund, but you don't know how long you should have to wait.
Deadline
Payers of many kinds of income are required to submit a Form 1099 to both the recipient and the Internal Revenue Service. Income distributions that require this type of reporting include the following: proceeds from broker and barter exchange transactions; dividends and distributions; certain government and qualified state tuition program payments; interest income; miscellaneous income; original issue discount; distributions from pensions, annuities, retirement, or profit-sharing plans, IRAs, insurance contracts, etc.; social security benefits; and payments by the Railroad Retirement Board. However, the payers do not have an unlimited time in which to make the mandatory filing. They have until the first Monday in February to put the various Forms 1099 in the mail, and you should receive them by early February.
If you do not get the form you are waiting for early in February, you are entitled to contact the payer. If you still have not received the expected form by the middle of the month, you should contact the IRS.
Substitution
In many cases, the lack of a Form 1099 can be overcome by some work on your part. Although the Form 1099 is the official reporting of certain types of income, you may be able to get the information from other sources and file your tax return. Many bank statements include the amounts of interest earned in various accounts, or you might be able to contact them directly for the information. If you have received dividend checks during the year, you might have cumulative dividend statements for the year. The fact that you were able to "reconstruct" the missing Form 1099 does not create a filing problem because you are usually not required to attach the form to your tax return.
If you receive a Form 1099 after you have filed your return, you should amend your tax return if you did not report the proper amount of income. Copyright 2010 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |