Letters 63C and 62C: A payee told the IRS your W-2 or 1099-R never arrived: 10 days to respond to the payee

What Letters 63C and 62C is

The IRS sends Letter 63C to the employer or payer, and Letter 62C to the payee, when a taxpayer calls after February 17 about a Form W-2 or 1099-R that was "not furnished, either electronically or in paper form, or is incorrect/lost" and has already "taken action to secure" it from the issuer. The assistor tells the payee "the employer has 10 calendar days from receipt of the letter to respond directly to the taxpayer" (IRM 21.3.6.4.7.1, Oct. 1, 2026). The letter is sent only for Forms W-2 and 1099-R: "For non-receipt, incorrect, or loss of Form 1098 and/or Form 1099, taxpayers should NOT complete Form 4852 ... Do not send Letter 62C or Letter 63C." A payee who cannot get the form files on Form 4852 with pay stubs or statements and amends later if the form arrives.

The deadline

10 calendar days from receipt, to respond to the payee, not to the IRS.

What to do

Send the payee the form, or a corrected one, directly; the IRS is not expecting a reply and the manual tells assistors that a Letter 63C returned by an employer is treated "as classified waste." Check the payee's address on your file against the one on the letter, since a wrong address is the usual cause. If the form was never filed, file it and furnish it now. For a 1099-NEC, 1099-MISC or 1098 the IRS sends no letter; a payee's complaint about those comes to you directly or not at all.

Why only W-2s and 1099-Rs draw a letter

The IRS's own procedure for a missing income document is built around withholding. A Form W-2 or 1099-R carries federal income tax withheld, and a taxpayer who cannot get the form cannot claim the credit, so the manual gives assistors a substitute form (Form 4852) and a letter to the issuer. For every other information return the manual says the opposite: no Form 4852, no Letter 62C, no Letter 63C (IRM 21.3.6.4.7.1, Oct. 1, 2026). A contractor who never received a 1099-NEC is told to report the income from their own records; the IRS does not write to the payer, and nothing in the procedure tells the payee whether the payer filed. The one exception the manual flags is the worker who received a 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC "when they expected to receive a Form W-2": that is a worker classification question, out of scope for the phone line, and the path for it is Form SS-8 and Form 8919.

What the IRS will not send you

Neither letter asks the payer for anything the IRS will read. The assistor tells the payee the employer or payer "has 10 calendar days from receipt of the letter to respond directly to the taxpayer," and the manual's instruction for a Letter 63C that comes back to the IRS from an employer is to treat it "as classified waste" (IRM 21.3.6.4.7.1). There is no penalty on the letter and no follow-up procedure; the consequence of ignoring it is that the payee files Form 4852 with their own estimate of the wages and withholding, which is then matched against what you reported, and a mismatch becomes the payee's problem and, through the underreporter and refund-integrity programs, eventually a call to you. What that call looks like is on IRS asking about a payee.

The same chapter answers the question payers ask most about their own filings. A payer who asks the IRS for copies of the 1099s or Form 1096 it filed is told that the IRS "cannot provide copies of the actual forms. Actual forms, if submitted on paper, are destroyed once information is stored electronically"; what exists is the transcript of the data, on IRPTR for the 1099s and PATRA for the 1096 (IRM 21.3.6.4.6.4, Oct. 1, 2024). Keep your own copies; the IRS keeps the numbers.

Questions about Letters 63C and 62C

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