The deadline for filing a 2020 tax return is May 17, which is also the deadline for more than one million taxpayers to claim their refund for their 2017 taxes.
The IRS says unclaimed tax refunds from 2017 amount to more than $1.3 billion.
"The IRS wants to help taxpayers who are due refunds but haven't filed their 2017 tax returns yet," said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig in a written statement. "Time is quickly running out for these taxpayers. There's only a three-year window to claim these refunds, and the window closes on May 17.”
The law provides taxpayers, in some cases, a three-year window to file and claim a refund. If a person doesn’t, the unclaimed money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury.
The Internal Revenue Service provided a state-by-state breakdown of where the unclaimed refunds are estimated to belong.
More than $138 million is estimated to belong to individuals in Texas, about $89 million for individuals in Florida and about $26 million is estimated to belong to individuals in Colorado.
The median unclaimed refund from 2017 is about $865.
Find more information about the unclaimed 2017 refunds, and this year’s May 17 deadline, on IRS.gov.