My local paper had a short notice that said taxpayers who took a required minimum distribution from an IRA, 401(k) or other qualified retirement account this year have until Nov. 30 to deposit the money back tax-free, according to the Internal Revenue Service. I called the holder of my IRA to ask about returning my monthly distributions. The response was: You can return one monthly distribution, not the entire 12 months. I would appreciate your take on this.

Arthur H. Wilson San Antonio

Thanks to a one-year reprieve, you can skip retirement-account withdrawals in 2009. And in some cases, you can return unwanted withdrawals. However, as this reader discovered, you only get to do so once.

Generally, Uncle Sam requires that people age 70 ½ and older take what are called minimum distributions each year from traditional IRAs and 401(k)s, based on their life expectancies, and pay income tax on those amounts. But late last year, Congress suspended the withdrawal requirement for 2009 in an effort to give retirees' nest eggs more time to recover from the stock market's drop in 2008.

Unfortunately, many people took distributions before they learned that they didn't have to. And some 401(k) custodians, worried about violating the documents that govern employer-sponsored plans, required participants to withdraw money anyway.

On Sept. 24, the Internal Revenue Service issued a notice allowing people who took unwanted distributions this year to return the money to a tax-deferred account by Nov. 30, or 60 days from the date the funds were received, whichever is later. (Normally, the IRS gives account holders 60 days to change their minds.) You can read the notice by going to www.irs.gov and typing "Notice 2009-82" into the search box.

But another rule allowing only one such rollover a year wasn't changed. So, if you took more than one distribution from a traditional IRA this year, you can put only one back.

There are a few ways, potentially, to get "excess" distributions (beyond an initial distribution) back into a tax-deferred retirement account. If you have a 401(k), you might be able to transfer money into it that you can't return to an IRA, if your 401(k) plan allows it.

You also could try a two-step approach, suggests Ed Slott , an IRA consultant in Rockville Centre, N.Y.: First, put the money you withdrew from your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. If you don't want to pay the tax involved, or your income winds up being too high this year for you to qualify to do a Roth conversion, you could later "recharacterize" the transaction. That way, you could transfer the money back to a traditional IRA. The deadline for recharacterizing a 2009 Roth conversion is Oct. 15, 2010.

How do you return a withdrawal to an IRA account if your IRA custodian withheld taxes from it? You can pay back the gross amount, and then get any extra tax you paid as a refund next year, Mr. Slott said.

Finally, several readers asked how to actually go about returning money in an IRA. Your IRA custodian decides that process, so be sure to check with the financial institution that holds your account. Vanguard Group Inc. is getting ready to send out email reminders to clients, and is taking returns online, by phone or by mail. On its Web site, there is a button to click to indicate a "rollover" (which is how a return is typically described); if calling the toll-free number, customers need to say the contribution is a rollover; and checks sent through the mail need to be accompanied by a letter indicating a 2009 rollover, a spokeswoman said.

Charles Schwab Corp. is requiring IRA holders returning funds either to take a check to a local office or send it in with a letter so it can code the transaction as a rollover. And Fidelity Investments is steering customers to online tools to guide them through the process of returning IRA assets, though they have to do so by check.