A tax question

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I live in New York. All my life I’ve mailed my tax return to Andover, Massachusetts. But this year I was directed to mail my return to Kansas City, Missouri. Which made me notice the mailing plan.

What is the plan? The IRS divided the country up into five regions. A certain sense of logic would dictate each region would have ten states, would be connected geographically, and have approximately equal populations.

But you’ve got the Andover region which now has only five states: Northern New England linked with Maryland and the District of Columbia for a combined population of under fifteen million. On the other end you’ve got the Fresno region which contains twenty-two states and a combined population of over ninety-eight million. You’ve got tax returns from Rhode Island and Delaware and Michigan being mailed to Missouri but not the returns from Kansas or Illinois or Tennessee, all of which are adjacent to Missouri. Tax returns from Kentucky and Puerto Rico get mailed to Texas but not the returns from Oklahoma or New Mexico.

2

Where are the IRS staff located? Are they equally distributed across the five processing centres?

3

I can’t see anyway to make this plan logical. Even if the staff is balanced for the amount of returns they receive, how can they justify the geography? For example, they could take Maryland and DC and put them in the Kansas City region and put Rhode Island and Connecticut into the Andover region. The resulting populations would be pretty much the same and all four locations would be closer to their mailing address.

4

I wonder if it to reduce the chance that the IRS employee who is inputting your information is less likely to know you, thus reducing the chance of an ‘accidental’ mistype in your favor? My neice works at the KC IRS office. I’ll have to ask her.