What to do if your 60 days roll-over period is over and you still didn't finish the rollover?

There can be several reasons for the missed or prolonged rollover.

Not serious reasons

Forgetfulness, procrastination, laziness - nothing will help there. If you have no serious reason, you will have to pay taxes due and you will get them refunded after you file your tax return for that year.

Serious reasons
If one of the reasons below delayed your transfer, you can file the self-certification waiver which you will submit to the institution receiving the transfer. 

After 60 days allotted to the rollover are passed, the financial institution will not accept your rollover. 
The self-certification error is a form which you give to the institution to extend the rollover for another 30 days (safe harbor period for the reason stated in the form). 
The form is part of the IRS Revenue Procedure 2016-47 which you can google, download and fill out.  

To be granted the waiver you will need documentation supporting your claim that the rollover was not completed in time due to one of the qualifying reasons which are listed on the waiver page. 

   

Financial institution error

Copy and record the dates of all communications with both financial institutions. If the process takes too long you will have evidence that it was not your fault. 

It will not work if you wait with the initiating the rollover just one or two weeks before the deadline because it is obvious to anyone that such process may take longer than 2 weeks. Our rollover took 3 weeks (see the rollover update post here).  

Unusual circumstances

You have to have evidence that you were physically prevented from being able to complete the rollover.  Examples are severe home damage, serious illness (for example dementia or hospitalization), death in the family or of the person who is performing rollover, misplaced check or incarceration.

Postal error

Make sure to verify the address of the receiving institution before mailing the check. It is best to mail with tracking number. I used tracking number. The mail had 3 days delay for an unknown reason but I could follow the status every day.
Tracking also helped me to speed up the processes at the receiving institution. I emailed the customer service the day I saw that the letter was received and asked to process the transfer timely. I received an email response and the the transfer was processed on the same day.

Update on our 401k rollover - step by step

As mentioned before we decided to do a 401k rollover to IRAs do to a job change.

We decided to do trustee-to-trustee transfer (see previous post with specifics on how to do a rollover).


It is best to start early and plan the rollover in time where you will not travel much. There was a bit of hands on in our rollover process.


1. We called the previous employer 401k and requested a trustee-to-trustee transfer. 
They said that they only have one way they do it - issuing a check in the trustee name and mailing it to your address. That qualifies as trustee-to-trustee transfer because the check is in trustees name. 
They mailed us two checks, one for the Roth 401k portion and another one for the non-Roth 401k portion. 
It took about 7 days until we had the checks in our hands.


2. We called the receiving institution to verify the address to mail the checks to. 
They explained which form to fill out and to mail together with the checks. 
They also recommended to mail the checks in separate envelopes to avoid that someone might erroneously switch the Roth and non-Roth checks and and deposit the checks to wrong accounts. That was also my concern and I agreed.
We were also advised NOT to sign the back of the checks since the checks were issued to the receiving institution and not to us. 
It took us about 4 days including weekend.


3. We mailed both checks separately with tracking numbers. 
It took 7 days, 3 days longer then expected by USPS.


4. I was tracking the checks. On the day I saw that the checks were arrived, I emailed the receiving institution and asked them to perform a timely rollover. That was completed correctly on the same day and I received a confirmation email from them. 


It took about 3 weeks in all.