Filing Form 941-X instead of 843 to recover overpaid payroll taxes isn’t fatal. A firm that twice paid an IRS assessment for payroll taxes filed the 941-X within 24 months of making the second payment to recover the duplicate funds.
At the behest of an agency employee, it later filed Form 843 to request the refund. IRS then denied the Form 843 refund claim because it was filed more than two years after the employer paid the payroll taxes. A district court didn’t buy IRS’s argument, calling it a “damp squib,” and ruled that the employer’s timely filing of the 941-X fairly advised the Service of the nature of the claim.
Birger Engineering, D.C., Mass.