Almost $10M in tax refunds sitting at DOA

by Ken Quintanilla

Guam - Nearly $10 million in unclaimed tax refunds sits at the Department of Administration. And while the agency is set to mail out over $4 million in refunds out this week, it's still undetermined how it intends to distribute refunds that have been sitting at DOA for months.

"We should be getting those checks from Rev & Tax and as soon as we receive them tomorrow morning we'll prep them and send them out Wednesday," said Benita Manglona, DOA's director. DOA will be mailing out $4.1 million worth of tax refunds checks to complete the distribution of nearly $14.5 million for 2011 and prior year refunds accumulated from additional Child Tax Credit reimbursements and rebates from Calvo's Selectcare.

Manglona says a debt still remains for 2011 and will be paid on cash availability, noting, "We'll still continue to pay out the refunds as cash becomes available and we'll definitely prioritize paying tax refunds, we'll probably be doing it continue to do it on a weekly basis as we've done it before."

And while efforts are being made to pay for past due refunds, nearly $10 million of unclaimed refunds still remains at DOA in Hagatna. It was earlier this year we reported boxes of refunds sitting at DOA in which lawmakers brought it up again during budget hearing in the past couple of weeks. Manglona says these are checks that were mailed mostly from the December's mass tax refund distribution and returned by the post office to DOA. "They give the wrong address, they moved on, or some may have passed away, who knows," she said.

She adds DOA holds on to the money up to five years until the money goes back to the government. And while lawmakers have suggested either posting names online or outside of DOA, she says they lack of staff and legal authority to do so. Manglona said, "I'm not sure if we can do that, I'll probably have to get some legal advice whether we can publish names of taxpayers there might be some disclosure issues with that." Asked about calling them or informing them personally, she replied. "It's very difficult we don't have the staff to do that."

She says while taxpayers come into DOA on a regular basis to look if they have tax refunds, more checks still remain. She says if people know they are entitled to a refund and they never received one to call DOA to verify.