Four Bay Area Post Offices Open Monday Evening for Last-Minute Tax Filers

We still have Tax Day -- known universally as the last day to pay federal and state income taxes (or ask for an extension) without getting in hot water. For reasons arising from the local holiday calendar in Washington, D.C., the date has moved to April 18 from the traditional April 15.

Although we still have the deadline, one thing we no longer have is Tax Night -- an evening when some local post offices stayed open until midnight so that last-minute filers could get their paperwork in the mail on time.

As the Taxing Hour approached at my closest post office, in downtown Berkeley, the scene at some post offices was always a little frenzied, drivers pulling up, handing off envelopes stuffed with their paper returns to postal workers waiting on the curb. Some people could be seen jogging the last couple of blocks as the final minutes to the deadline ticked by.

The workers themselves always seemed unusually cheerful. They might have been scoring some decent overtime, I guess; and indirectly, the arriving crowds were paying their salaries.

There was something about arriving at the post office with hundreds of others late at night that seemed a little like a party: maybe from a shared relief at finishing a dreaded task, maybe from realizing you had a lot of company, or maybe from realizing you'd be getting a tax refund, after all.

"We created that circus," says Gus Ruiz, U.S. Postal Service spokesman for the Bay Area. "People knew we'd stay open late, so we created the procrastinators."

Of course, that's all history, now, a ritual finished off by the convenience of online filing. Ruiz says he guesses that now, most latecomers have procrastinated because they owe money to the IRS or state.

Last year, the Internal Revenue Service reported about 91 percent of individual tax returns were filed electronically. That means there's no more need for special midnight hours at local post offices -- though Ruiz says there are four in the Bay Area that are open after regular business hours. See the box above, and may the refund be with you.