You are your own tax preparer when you use the TT DIY program... and TT never touches your refund.
SBTPG is Santa Barbara Tax Product Group where your refund is transferred if you used the Refund Processing Service (pay your TurboTax fees with your Federal Refund)
What is Refund Processing Service?
Follow the steps below to track your refund when using the Refund Processing Option:
Step 1 - Check with the IRS
Get the status of your Federal tax refund by visiting the IRS "Where's My Refund?" page.
Check the status of your refund
Step 2 - Check with TPG
Once you have confirmed that your refund has been released by the IRS and you have selected a Refund Transfer from Santa Barbara TPG you may check the status of your Refund Transfer by visiting our website.
Check the status of your Refund Transfer
For more information, please see the link below:
TPG Santa Barbara Tax Product Group
If the IRS WMR tool at that link says your refund has been sent electronically, then where the funds go first depends on what you chose for your refund option. Look at your return PDF and view a page called Electronic Filing Instructions and that should show you what your refund choice was.
Here are some possibilities:
- If you chose no special handling, the IRS sends a direct deposit directly to your bank account (or card.) If your bank refuses the deposit, it goes back to the IRS who would issue a check in the mail.
- On the other hand, if you chose to pay any TurboTax fees out of your Federal refund, the IRS sends your refund to an intermediary bank where the fees are subtracted, and then that intermediary bank sends the remainder of the refund to your bank account (or card). The company that handles that is SBTPG, a Green Dot company, and the bank is often a Green Dot Bank or affiliate. If for some reason your bank refuses that deposit, it goes back to SBTPG's bank, who would normally issue a paper check in the mail. Less commonly, SBTPG might send a returned deposit back to the IRS and let the IRS send a check in the mail.
- If you chose to receive your refund into a Credit Karma Money Spend account and Credit Karma Visa Debit Card, that is handled by a bank called MVB Bank. Some people have said they ended up with that Credit Karma option without realizing it and spent weeks wondering where their money was, and it was at Credit Karma. If that happened to you, you can contact Credit Karma Support for the Money Spend account.
- A few users have reported that the IRS sent their refund to their brokerage cash account without their realizing it. I suspect these users had used the TurboTax import feature to import data from a brokerage account in the past and that TurboTax also imported that deposit info. In that case, the bank involved would be whatever particular underlying bank the brokerage uses to manage the cash funds in a client's brokerage account.
NOTE: It's also possible to have more than one of those situations if fees were paid out of the Federal refund (option 2). For example, a filer might have chosen situations 2 and 3, or 2 and 4.
