Do I need to file a tax return if I don't owe any taxes?

Answer 1

Yes.

26USC6012 requires anyone having more than a certain amount of income to file a tax return. 26USC7203 makes willful failure to file a return a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and/or a $25,000 fine. Neither of these laws carry any requirement that you owe money. It is extremely rare, but people have been successfully criminally prosecuted for failure to file even though they might owe no money. See Spies v. United States, 317 U.S. 492, 496 (1943); United States v. Wade, 585 F.2d 573, 574 (5th Cir. 1978).

Is the typical guy whose only source of income is a W-2 on which he had way too much tax withheld going to get prosecuted? No. Maybe if he gets arrested for something else like drugs, a tax charge might be piled onto his case. Or if he sends threatening letters to the IRS commissioner, they might take revenge. But not typically.

People who have never had any income other than a W-2 forget one fact: The IRS does not know whether you owe any money until you file your taxes. A lot of people have income from other sources that does not get reported on a W-2. They owe income tax on that, too. And the IRS does not know that you have dependents or have deductions or whatever unless you file a tax return. They need that statement, sworn under penalty of perjury, of your income, deductions, exemptions, credits, and so on to properly calculate whether you owe taxes. If you don't send it to them, they will make certain worst-case assumptions about you and could even pursue you for taxes you don't owe.

And if you don't file, the statute of limitations never starts running. That mean that the IRS can hound you over whether you owed taxes forever.

There are also certain elections that need to be made on or before the filing date. Failure to make these elections in a timely manner means you forfeit the opportunity. For example, you can take a return of your current year IRA contribution or recharacterize a contribution up until October 15 of the next year, but only if you file your return (or an extension) on time, even if you don't owe money.

Now many people will point to the fact that the civil penalty (as opposed to the rare criminal penalty) for filing late is based on the amount of money you owe. If you don't owe any money, the penalty is $0. (Note: some states impose penalties that may not be based on the amount you owe.) They then extrapolate that to mean you are not required to file and nothing will happen if you don't. These people do not know the big picture.

And I don't know how many times I've seen people say "I always get a refund" but this year they don't. And they don't realize it because they haven't filled out their taxes. Or they make a mistake on their taxes and the IRS catches them. They end up paying thousands of dollars in needless failure to file penalties because they didn't file on time.