BATON ROUGE — Louisiana taxpayers who quickly filed their state taxes and are eagerly waiting for their tax refunds will have to keep waiting.
The state Department of Revenue announced Wednesday that it won’t start issuing refunds until the week of March 2.
The department said it was taking “extra precautions to verify the filings” because of concerns about fraudulent tax returns that had been discovered around the country.
Refunds were previously planned to start going out next week before the delay was announced. The revenue department says the week-long postponement will give it more time to use a verification process to identify individual taxpayers.
Nearly 665,000 electronic returns have been filed with the state since Jan. 20, with no refunds issued so far.