Skip to footer

US tax time: A later deadline and other tax facts

Thanks to a holiday in Washington, D.C., the federal tax-filing deadline this year is April 17. The postponement provides an opportunity to learn exactly why you can file later and gives you time to review the following short list of tax facts worth knowing.

1. How the filing deadline moved to April 17

Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File
In this 2011 file photo, Paul Connolly chooses tax forms at the IRS office in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston, Mass.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff

Americans who think of April 15 as T-Day can thank Washington, D.C., this year for extending the traditional tax-filing deadline to April 17. There’s an interesting and in some ways ironic story here.

Normally, when April 15 falls on a Sunday, as it does this time, taxpayers are given a one-day reprieve. But this year’s grace day, April 16, happens to fall on Emancipation Day, an observance that became a holiday in the District of Columbia in 2005. By federal law, any holiday celebrated in the district has the same impact on tax deadlines as federal holidays.

The reason that Emancipation Day has achieved holiday status in district is because that is where President Abraham Lincoln made slaves living in the district the nation’s “First Freed,” signing the Compensated Emancipation Act nine months before issuing his historic Emancipation Proclamation.
The ironic aspect of Washington’s impact on the delayed tax-filing deadline is that the district does not have a voting representative in Congress, which has long been a sore point for residents. After all, it was the whole notion of “no taxation without representation” that fueled the Colonists anger over tariffs, led to the Boston Tea Party protest in 1773, and ultimately sparked the Revolutionary War.

Americans have been tax-averse ever since, and it took the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913 after four years by the requisite 36 states, to make an income tax a permanent fixture of the US system.

1 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.