Q Why is it that this is the first year the Emporia post office did not postmark income tax returns until midnight? We had no warning about the change until the morning of April 15. Is this local or nationwide?
A “Basically, government regulation is that unless you’re a mail processing center or have authorization, once you dispatch (after the last mail pickup) ... then the postmark role is over,” said Postmaster Roger Clark. “We’ve just been doing that as a courtesy for the last 20 years and maybe before that.”
The last dispatch in Emporia is at 5:45 p.m., when the mail will be taken to the mail-processing center in Topeka.
Clark said that the number of people who had used the late-postmarking service had dwindled considerably with the advent of electronic filing, and with the nationwide financial crunch, “we have to save all the money we can.”
An article about change on the midnight postmarking was published on Page 1 of the April 14 issue of The Gazette.