My 2024 federal refund got mysteriously changed from receiving a check to being routed to a different bank account.

[tc24ever]

I do not know where to begin with this…but somehow someone got my federal tax refund routed to an unknown account despite that I didn’t request direct deposit.

I had e-filed with TT back in early April and I had requested to get my refund via check. I managed to get my State Refund without any issues after verifying my SSN and total State Refund.

After a month of waiting for my Federal Refund, I got curious and went to check on the status and it said it was already delivered in late April. This was strange because I never received a check. So I looked at my bank statement from last month and nowhere did it show a deposit into my account. I started to panic and pulled up a PDF of my tax return thinking I might’ve messed something up, and to my shock and horror I found that somehow my federal refund had been filled out to be deposited to a bank account that wasn’t even mine.

I can’t believe this! How is it that my check refund was mysteriously changed to direct deposit? Did someone from TT or the IRS edit my information without my knowledge and basically stole $1,082 from me? How am I suppose to get my money back?

[xmasbaby0]

Did you choose to pay your TurboTax fees by having those fees deducted from your federal refund?   If you made that choice, then your refund was processed through a third party bank.

if you chose to have your TurboTax fees deducted from your federal refund then the banking information on the tax form is the information to send your refund to the third party bank.  That bank gets your refund first from the IRS.  They take out your TurboTax fees and send the rest to you---and that bank has YOUR direct deposit information.

What is Refund Processing Service?

Santa Barbara Tax Products Group, LLC  (SBTPG) is the bank that handles the Refund Processing Service when you choose to have your TurboTax fees deducted from your refund. This option also has an additional charge from the bank that processes the transaction. 

You can contact them SBTPG, toll-free, at 1-877-908-7228 or go to their secure website www.sbtpg.com 

[HollyP]

No. Neither TurboTax nor the IRS will edit your deposit information. Once you've submitted your return, we have no control over the processing of your refund, and the deposit information cannot be change. 

If you entered a valid (but incorrect) account number that doesn't belong to you, there's usually nothing to worry about. Most banks won't deposit tax refunds into accounts where the names don't match. For security reasons, the IRS can't reroute your refund to a different account. You’ll get your refund via a paper check, but there will be a delay. For more info, check out our article, What if I entered the wrong bank account for direct deposit?

[SteamTrain]

Another thing to check.....if you didn't have you software fees paid out of your Federal Refund.

If you have a brokerage account, check any activity in there....sometime people accidentally directed the refund to their brokerage account, and the routing/account numbers for those are something you wouldn't immediately recognize.

[tc24ever]

That’s the thing though, I had requested to receive my refund by check and not by direct deposit.

I had just looked up the routing number for the bank that’s on my tax file and it traces back to a bank in West Virginia, and I live in Wisconsin, and also the account number it was deposited into is nowhere even similar to my account number.