“Where Is My North Dakota Tax Refund?”

When everything seems to be slowly getting back to normal after a disastrous COVID-19 year, the aid to those who are really struggling financially is being addressed with another round of stimulus (the 3rd one) in about a year. The $1.9 trillion relief package appears to have cleared the last hurdle, and payments could hit millions of Americans’ bank accounts by next week. This year we saw the IRS delay their filing season to the 12th of last month, but I sure experienced a fairly quick refund, about 12 days after they accepted my taxes. North Dakota tax refunds not so fast.

According to the Inforum, North Dakota agents are taking more time than usual to look at the returns they have received. I didn't know this, but North Dakota has a strict fraud detection policy - and they are not just being extra paranoid, their records show that over the last five years they found 1,500 cases of tax fraud that came out to be about $3.1 million dollars. According to Rachel Flagstad, the public information officer for the North Dakota Tax Office, they've gotten about 170,000 filed returns, and just over 10,000 of them are waiting to be checked for fraud or taxpayer errors. 

With the anticipation of getting your state refund, it all depends also on how you filed, whether you did it electronically or the old fashioned way - Devon Liljenquist, a certified public accountant at Arrow Advisors in Fargo added that "I wouldn't say there's more backlog on one side or the other, I mean, there's way more returns that are filed electronically, but they also process much faster when they're electronic"

Good things come to those that wait, right???