IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said Thursday that the IRS could eliminate its huge backlog of returns by the end of the year. His optimistic forecast comes as millions of people still expect the overburdened agency to process refunds from previous tax returns and send their refunds, even when the IRS enters a new tax filing season. ‘taxes.
The IRS still had 23 million items in its backlog to overcome in the face of this year’s tax filing season as it struggled to overcome the obstacles aggravated by the Coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this year, the taxpayer’s advocate wrote in her report on The IRS was in crisis. Treasury and IRS officials warned that this could be the most difficult tax filing season for taxpayers and preparers to date.
Rettig appeared before the House Media and Media Committee on Thursday for a hearing on the tax filing season. He said the agency would “absolutely” overcome the delay before the end of 2022.
“If the world stays the way it is today, we will be what we call healthy by the end of the calendar year ’22, and we will enter the presentation season of ’23 with normal inventories, healthy in the eyes of the taxpayer,” said Rettig. .
The Department of Finance i The IRS announced a plan last week to catch up on this year’s pandemic-related delay. The effort includes hiring 10,000 IRS employees over the next year, including 5,000 in the coming months. The IRS has also been granted more hiring authority, allowing the agency to get new employees to the door faster. Previously, the recruitment process took six to eight months, Rettig said, but with their new skills, employees could join in 30 to 35 days.
The agency already has a team of 800 experienced IRS employees who have been working since last month through amended statements and other taxpayer correspondence in arrears. Another team of 700 people is also gathering to help process the original returns.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, the IRS closed its processing centers in the middle of the tax return season. Although the centers reopened in June, the agency was left with more than 23 million emails unopened to spend that July. The IRS is capable of opening between 1 and 1.5 million emails a week and had to fight back. The situation made snowball.
The IRS also had to fulfill additional responsibilities, such as delivery of stimulus controls i advance payments of tax credit for children to millions of Americans during the pandemic. The agency has provided more than $ 1.5 trillion in aid since the pandemic began.
But the main challenge the IRS continues to face during the tax filing season, according to the agency, is paper returns, which involve the tedious process of physically entering information into its systems.
“The problem for the Internal Revenue Service has always been paper, before the pandemic and during the pandemic,” Rettig said.
Looking ahead to this year’s tax filing season, the IRS has encouraged everyone who can file returns electronically to do so and stresses the importance of accuracy. The agency maintains that those who file electronically accurate statements should receive refunds within 21 days.
For the 2022 tax filing season, the IRS has received more than 63 million individual tax returns as of March 11 and has issued more than 45 million refunds for a total of more than 151 billion of dollars. The tax filing period is extended until Monday, April 18th.
- In:
- internal revenue service
- tax returns
- tax reform
Add Comment