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If your income changed in 2020 over 2019, tax expert Don DeSantis told ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross that there may be an argument for delaying your tax return, though not past the due date of April 15.

Dave discovers three instances of ‘free money’ while preparing 2020 taxes

“There’s this most recent stimulus bill, and this one has another round of checks. But as people may have heard in the news the last few weeks, there was a lot of debate on who should get the checks,” said DeSantis, of . “The bill that’s passed the Senate, which is probably going to form the basis of the final law, set much lower phase out limits. So, for example, if you’re a single person, you can make up to $75,000 and receive a check — between $75,000 and $80,000, it will phase out. So if you made more than $80,000, that’s it. You don’t receive a check.”

“And for married couples, it’s a similar type of thing — $150,000, but it phases out at $160,000. So these checks will also be based on the last information the IRS has on you,” he added.

That means if you haven’t filed your 2020 return yet, the IRS has your 2019 return to go off.

“It really comes down to what happened between 2019 and 2020,” DeSantis said. “Did your income go up, or did your income go down? If you don’t file your 2020 return because you would qualify based on 2019 income, you might just sit back for a couple weeks and wait until the IRS issues those checks, and then file your return later.”

This is not a lie and nothing improper, DeSantis clarifies, but the IRS will base the checks off the last information they received from you.

“I might add: April 15th, though, is the due date. So when I say wait a couple weeks, I don’t mean wait two months,” he said.

The most common question DeSantis said he’s heard is if stimulus checks from last March are taxable.

“The answer is no, they’re not taxable,” he said. “If you got your check and everything was fine, great. You don’t have to do anything in your tax return.”

“However, the IRS sent those checks out based on the last bit of information they had on you. And in many cases, that was people’s 2018 tax return,” he explained. “And, of course, their income could have changed in 2019. So it’s possible that some people who got checks last year got the wrong amount. They got too little or too much.”

For those who got too little, there’s a worksheet to fill out in your tax return this year to show how much you are entitled to receive, what you actually received, and they’ll send the balance.

Avoiding the ‘April surprise’

The other point of consideration DeSantis spoke about is a potential tax surprise for people who are getting unemployment for the first time.

“Unemployment compensation has always been taxable,” DeSantis said. “However, there’s probably millions of people in the year 2020 who received unemployment, who had never received unemployment before. And they would probably be pretty surprised when filing their tax return this spring to find out that $15,000 or $20,000 they received is now additional income on their return for which they have had no withholding.”

“They might have to end up writing a healthy check to the IRS,” he added. “This recent bill, which is on the verge of being passed, is going to provide for a special role here. If your income is under $150,000, then the first $10,200 in unemployment benefits will be tax free.”

This will help avoid what DeSantis called “the April surprise.”

DeSantis also discusses the increased child tax credits in 2021 and a slight change to charitable deductions. Listen to the full interview .

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.