This is a guest post from Jim at Bargaineering. If you like what you see here, please consider subscribing to his RSS feed.

If you haven’t yet received your W-2 form, which reports your wages for the past year, chances are the post office monster ate it. By law, your employer is required to mail a copy of your W-2 to you by January 31st, which means it should get to you at the latest before mid-February. Since it’s early March, we are way past the deadline and since your employer probably didn’t forget, it’s likely disappeared into the abyss of the postal system.

So what are you supposed to do? The easiest way to handle this situation is to go to your payroll or human resources department and ask them for another copy. If you’re eager to get your taxes done and/or don’t want to risk it getting lost in the mail (again!), you can ask them to print you out a copy and hold it for you to pick up in person. If you’re due a tax refund (the average tax refund last year was almost $2700), requesting an in-person pickup can help you file and thus get your refund that much faster.

What if you received your W-2 form but lost it? Do the same thing, go to payroll or HR and request another copy. In either case you might have to fill out a form, depending on how strict your company’s policies are, to get a new copy but it’s usually not a big deal, and you also don’t have much of a choice.

What if you never received a 1099 form? That’s easy… This post explains how to handle a missing 1099 form.

Happy filing!