I.R.S. to Start Tax Season With Major Backlog

The Inner Income Service will kick off the approaching tax season with a backlog of at the very least 10 million unprocessed returns from final yr, in accordance with a brand new report by the Nationwide Taxpayer Advocate.

The pile of returns remaining are from the “most difficult yr taxpayers and tax professionals have ever skilled,” the advocate, Erin M. Collins, wrote in her report.

One cause for the backlog: Stimulus funds to the individuals from the federal government through the pandemic have been largely routed by the I.R.S., which Ms. Collins mentioned was already brief staffed.

The overwhelming majority of taxpayers — 77 % — acquired refunds in 2021, however tens of hundreds of thousands of them skilled delays. Ms. Collins known as final yr’s scenario “horrendous” from the standpoint of taxpayers. Though the backlog will not be too totally different from final season’s, it’s far larger than the backlog the I.R.S. usually confronted earlier than the pandemic started.

“Paper is the I.R.S.’s Kryptonite, and the company remains to be buried in it,” Ms. Collins mentioned in a press release about her 2021 annual report, which was despatched to Congress on Wednesday. The Workplace of the Taxpayer Advocate, which Ms. Collins leads, is an impartial entity that sits throughout the I.R.S. It focuses on problems with taxpayer rights and taxpayer providers.

The I.R.S. itself warned taxpayers on Monday that staffing shortages and backlogs would translate into one other irritating submitting season, which begins on Jan. 24 and runs by April 18 (in most states).

Ms. Collins reiterated the company’s advice that Congress present it with sufficient cash to do its job. Since 2010, the I.R.S.’s staffing is down 17 % and its workload over the identical interval, measured by the variety of particular person returns, is up by 19 % to 169 million in 2021, from 142 million the yr earlier than, in accordance with the report.

Over the previous two years, the company has been charged with administering a number of pandemic-related applications, together with three rounds of stimulus (totaling 478 million funds price $812 billion) and one other $93 billion prematurely funds for the expanded little one tax credit score to greater than 36 million households.

“One irony of the previous yr is that, regardless of its challenges, the I.R.S. carried out nicely beneath the circumstances,” Ms. Collins wrote.

As of late December, the I.R.S. had six million unprocessed authentic tax returns, 2.3 million amended returns, greater than two million employer’s quarterly returns and 5 million items of taxpayer correspondence — with some submissions relationship to April and lots of taxpayers nonetheless ready for refunds, in accordance with the advocate’s report. In distinction, there are normally lower than one million unaddressed returns in a extra typical yr, in accordance with Treasury officers.

Even hundreds of thousands of returns filed electronically — which normally circulate by the system extra shortly — had been suspended throughout processing due to discrepancies between the quantities claimed on returns and what the I.R.S. had on file.

The problem arose most ceaselessly with the “restoration rebate credit score,” which taxpayers claimed when they didn’t obtain half or all of their financial incentive funds from the prior yr. These returns needed to be manually reviewed by the company, which resulted in additional than 11 million math error notices. When the taxpayer disagreed with the error and submitted a response, the report mentioned, it went into the I.R.S.’s paper processing backlog, additional delaying the refund.

Ms. Collins wrote that these discrepancies are more likely to crop up once more this tax season — this time for the third spherical of stimulus funds, issued in March, and the brand new superior little one tax credit — leading to extra delayed returns. The I.R.S. is attempting to move these issues off by sending notices to taxpayers who acquired the stimulus and credit score funds, exhibiting how a lot they acquired.