SPOKANE, Wash. – The IRS has extended the federal tax filing and payment deadline for Spokane and Whitman county residents due to the Gray and Oregon Road fires last August and President Biden’s subsequent major disaster declaration in late February.
Shari Pope has been a tax preparer for nearly three decades and works at Clear Choice Tax Services in Spokane.
“I have friends that work for other tax people, and I was talking to them and I don’t think one of them believed me [when I told them about the extension],” Pope said.
The IRS announced the extension for Spokane County residents on February 28. Whitman County was added to the extension on April 4.
If you’re a resident or own a business in either of the counties, instead of your tax deadline being the traditional April 15, it’s now two months later: June 17.
“What that means is you don’t have to file or even pay until then,” Pope said. “For some folks that is a blessing, because it gives them two more months to gather the money.”
Pope says the extension is automatically granted to taxpayers in Spokane and Whitman counties, with no application necessary. It applies to every taxpayer–even if they didn’t have property damage in either fire.
“Even though I didn’t lose my house, I’m still impacted,” Pope said. “I have children that were evacuated, and they had animals. It does impact a lot of people, just not as bad, just in different ways.”
This can come as surprising news for sure, but actually, Pope said it’s more common than most people might realize.
“I think it happens quite often in disaster areas,” she said.
In fact, a quick check of the IRS website shows that in 2024 alone, the IRS has made more than a handful of tax extension announcements for areas affected by severe weather, like parts of Michigan, West Virginia, Rhode Island, California and Hawaii, for last summer’s devastating wildfires.
“When you think about people who have lost everything, they have to duplicate all of their documents, and that takes time,” Pope said.
The federal tax extension isn’t the only form of tax relief Spokane County residents have gotten because of the fires.
Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner’s office and other county departments granted property tax extensions to those directly impacted by the fires last year.
“We were very happy to help them, we wanted to do everything that we could do,” Baumgartner said Thursday. “There were about 700, nearly 800 parcels that were impacted. We granted over 200 tax extensions, and about 200 reductions in property tax values in refunds were given to people that were impacted.”
But even though taxpayers have a couple extra months to file their 2023 federal returns if they need to, Pope says they should still probably do it sooner rather than later.
“I don’t want my clients to wait,” she said. “I just can’t believe how many returns we’d have to do if we had to have them done by Monday, none of us would sleep!”
For more information on the federal tax deadline extension, visit the IRS official website by clicking here.
