Penalty for not filing U.S. income tax, if one will receive a refund?
On the original question: no there’s no requirement to file if you do not owe taxes. However, it’s entirely possible that the IRS cannot tell you don’t owe if you don’t file and it might appear to them that you do. If so, they might calculate your taxes themselves and if their calculation shows you owe, they’ll both charge you a penalty and interest and demand you pay. They might file a lien, too, in that situation. This happened to me. They make very little attempt calculate this accurately; they probably don’t have the information to do so. Once I filed, the result was that I was actually owed a small refund (contrasted against their calculation that I’d owed them something like forty-thousand dollars). The ironic part, though, was that they still said I owed them for the fee for filing the tax lien. By the way, my situation was that I had an enormous capital loss that they really had no way of calculating.
From what I’ve read, it is not an advance on a 2008 tax credit nor is it an advance on your 2008 tax refund. Since receiving the stimulus check has no impact on your 2008 taxes at all, I see no way that it could be an advance on a tax credit or an advance on a tax refund. The only reason you will have to report it on your 2008 is to record how much you received and if you received the maximum amount for which you are eligible.
Like I said, it’s an advance on a 2008 tax credit. On your 2008 tax return, which you’ll prepare next year, you’ll add a tax credit of $600 (for example) to your refund, then subtract that back out if you received a stimulus check. If you didn’t receive a stimulus check, but you would have been eligible if you had done your 2007 tax return on time, then you won’t subtract the $600 back out, and your refund will be $600 more than it would have been. Either way, you get stimulated.
