Could someone please help? I am preparing to do my taxes next week and I noticed that I made (or the turbo tax program) made a huge mistake. My taxes are not very difficult to do myself so I do them myself. I have no itemizations to do or anything else that you could say would make me filing my taxes difficult to do. I am classified as earning below the poverty limit of like 18000 dollars a year. I have one child that lives with me full time whom I receive the EIC payment every year for. Now here is the question... I just realized that I must have hit an extra numeric key that added an additional 1 on my income earned on my w2 or there was some kind of problem with the software that I used. Any way, I figure by my calculation that it resulted in an EIC overpayment of nearly 2500 dollars. I guess that I did not pay attention enough because my return was not much different then any other year. I just earned less for 2007 then my previous years, but only by a couple of thousand dollars. Could someone please help... am I going to go to jail or what? :eek:

I have no expertise here, however, it's obviously a problem. Have you spent the money that you weren't supposed to be given? If not, I would imagine you can call the sect of government that would handle taxes, and simply tell them you made an error and need to return the money.

Obviously, that's a wishful thinking answer, but, I'm not sure what else you can do.

You aren't going to jail. I'm a little confused here, though. Did you notice the mistake in preparing this year's return or that you made the mistake on LAST year's return. If the mistake is on this year's return, just fix it, you haven't filed yet so no harm no foul.

If it was on last year's return that has already been filed and you have received the refund, then you need to file an amended return and pay the government back. You can probably make arrangements to repay them from this year's refund.

Agreed; jail will NOT happen. You made a simple mistake, which you need to fix by amending the return.

I am chime in here too. Simple errors are exactly that. File an amended return for 2007 (Form 104X). Check back to get someone who may be willing to walk you through an installment payment agreement if you cannont pay the amount in full.