Income taxes

[dylancarly]

Hello
During a chapter 13 can you file electronically and receive your refund by direct deposit or do you have to manually file and get a refund via check. My trustee took the amount of my last years refund and divided by 12 and added that to my monthly income on schedule I. So basically my income is overinflated by a few hundred bucks each month until I get my refund. I would imagine They would not ask for my refund seeing it is viewed as income. My refund was over 3000 dollars so I guess that is why it was added it to my income. (That was my attorneys thoughts). I have recently changed my exemptions to try to break even so the couple hundred bucks will be made up in my monthly checks rather than waiting for the refund. However I am not sure how this will work out seeing that most of my refund was a result of child tax credits, and mortgage and student loan interest.
Any Thoughts
Thanks

[SinkingFast]

It really depends on your particular Trustee.

At our 341, the Trustee specifically told a filer ahead of us not to use a filing service or take a "Rapid Refund". As we were walking out, our attny noted to us that he'd never heard the Trustee say anything like that before. The attny was guessing the Trustee didn't want the filer paying the Rapid Refund "loan" fees.

The Trustee wants to see our Income Tax returns before he'll close our BK. We told our attny we typically use TurboTax, efile, and use direct deposit to get our refunds. Our attny said that would be OK. Just be sure not to spend the money until we know what portion our Trustee will take. Our attny said our Trustee isn't a stickler for having to get THE IRS refund check himself. But, the Trustee also won't take a personal check as payment either. If we get a substantial refund and have to pay a pro-rated amount, we will have to get a Cashier's Check for payment.

Just a suggestion based on what we were told,........... File like you always do. If that's electronically, just do it. But have the IRS mail you your refund check instead of using Direct Deposit. Immediately take a copy of your filed income taxes to your attny. Your attny will fwd a copy to the Trustee. Maybe by the time you receive your refund check, you'll know what to expect. Whether you get to keep your refund or if you'll have to pay the Trustee a portion.

[helpless]

We are allowed to keep our refund, but was told by the trustee, that we could electonically file it, but not to have them deposit it in our bank account, to have them send us a check. Because if we try to have it electronically put in the bank, the bankruptcy might throw up a red flag. Don't know why that is, but we got our refund last year.