There is a familiar saying that, “Nothing in life is certain except for death and taxes!” There is no exception in trucking, especially in the certainty of the annual filing of the HVUT IRS Form 2290 for most. Although requirements to file are different for everyone and there are different fees associated with what weight class your operation falls into, there is always a fee to pay the IRS each year for your heavy vehicle use, whose due date is fast approaching.
These days it is a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to online filing methods now available. This tax used to require walking in and filing at your IRS office in order to obtain a stamped Schedule 1 as proof the tax was paid. For years I have used a service through expresstrucktax.com to file this form online, which costs me less than a $10 filing fee for my truck. Having an account allows you to save/edit/delete your vehicles easily and they also allow you to get credits for vehicles you take out of use if need be, when a piece of equipment is no longer in use during an already-paid period of time. I am not the only Team Run Smart Pro that uses this either, as our own Joey Slaughter wrote about his shared participation in using Express Truck Tax for his HVUT filing in his blog entitled “Easy way to file your HVUT IRS Form 2290” earlier this year.
With the due date to file for equipment in use during the month of July 2018 being the 31stof this month, you don’t have much time to file this mandatory annual tax. Be careful though, as a lot of high-priced services use this time of year to flood your email inbox with forceful advertisements that are even sometimes threatening. It is nothing terribly complicated and can be completed in minutes online, even by those of us not too terribly “technologically inclined”. Save yourself some time, money and frustration and file online, which will usually give you a stamped Schedule 1 to print out as proof of payment from the IRS within hours. Sometimes during this time of year the IRS gets slightly backed up, more so as we get closer to the due date, so file soon and resist procrastinating.