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IRS Seeks Refund Recipients

More than $6 million in unreturned tax refunds are owed to Pennsylvanians, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is encouraging taxpayers to visit its website to learn whether they are among more than 3,000 in Pennsylvania who may still have a refund check coming.

"That doesn't sound like a whole lot of people," said David Stewart, IRS spokesman for Pennsylvania. "But it's six million, folks, and that's an average refund of almost $2,000 per check. So we're not talking about chump change here. We're talking about serious money."

Mailing errors are to blame for the fact that the refunds haven't already been received, Stewart said. "Maybe there was a mistype, a misprint of some sort. There was something on what the taxpayer wrote that wasn't legible, for example, so that came back to the post office, and then they send it right back to us."

Adding to the confusion, email phishing scams often target taxpayers by claiming to be from the IRS, which does not contact would-be refundees by e-mail. If you receive such an email, Stewart said, "you can skip that email altogether, because it's not from the IRS, I can tell you that right now."

To learn the status of their refunds, Pennsylvanians should instead visit irs.gov and click on "Where's my refund?" Stewart said.