Finding Your Missing Tax Refunds

It's a sign more than 100-thousand taxpayers nationwide may be more worried about meeting this years' April 18th tax  deadline than figuring out what happened to their  last missing refund check they were supposed to get several years ago.

That's because the IRS has almost $165-million dollars in refunds to return to taxpayers it can't find.

And about 10% or those tax refunds nationwide, are for Florida residents, according to CBS4 Chief Consumer Investigator Al Sunshine.

Al reported from our Moneywatch Monday Phonebank that by federal law, the agency is not allowed to put up the names publically. But he says they are released for other groups to post and he checked out the thousands of local names on the listing from Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe Counties.

Al found that the IRS owes some $19-Million Dollars to more than 11,000 Florida taxpayers.

The average refund comes out to more than $17-hundred dollars.

Taxpayers can check out tax statues thru the irs.gov website.

But the "Where's my Refund" listing only works for this years' filing season.

To check to see if you may be owed any money from previous years, you have to contact the IRS at 1-800-829-1040.

You'll need your tax identification information, including the year you expected to get your refund. You'll need to know how much you're owed, so you're going to need to go thru your old tax records.

In most cases, the IRS says people have moved and not updated their mailing address with the Postal Service, so their refund checks go undelivered.