Tax season is underway, and that means millions of Americans will be gathering their paperwork together in order to file their returns on time. Just don’t count on the IRS to be prepared to handle them, as the agency is still working through a backlog of paper returns from last year’s tax filing season.
According to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s report to Congress:
…the IRS began 2022 with a backlog of 4.7 million original individual returns (Forms 1040) and 3.2 million original business returns. The IRS processed the carryover returns and most paper-filed returns received in 2022, cutting its original individual return and original business return inventories by mid-December to 1.0 million and 1.5 million, respectively, which is more typical of pre-pandemic years. For amended returns, the IRS cut the backlog from 2.4 million to 600,000 for individuals and from 1.2 million to 900,000 for businesses. Because the majority of individual taxpayers receive refunds, the reduction in unprocessed paper tax returns was a significant accomplishment. The IRS also reduced its inventory of Correspondence/Accounts Management cases from 6.3 million to 5.1 million. However, the number of returns in suspense status increased from 4.2 million to 5.9 million, primarily due to an increase of 1.3 million suspected identity theft cases. The backlog of ten million unprocessed tax returns and 5.1 million Accounts Management cases will be carried over into the 2023 filing season, creating challenges for the 2023 filing season before it even starts and continuing frustration and delays for taxpayers. [emphasis added]
The problems don’t end with the backlog of paper returns. There’s also the longstanding issue of the IRS not answering its phones:
In 2021, only 11 percent of callers reached a telephone assistor. In 2022, the percentage ticked up slightly to almost 13 percent. That still meant that about seven out of every eight calls did not get through to a telephone assistor. For those who did get through, the average time spent on hold increased from 23 minutes to 29 minutes.
And it was no better for accountants and other tax professionals:
In 2022, we regularly heard complaints from tax professionals and the organizations that represent them about the difficulty of reaching an IRS employee on the Practitioner Priority Service (PPS) telephone lines. Their frustration was understandable. In 2021, IRS employees answered 24 percent of the calls they received on the PPS line, and the average hold time was 16 minutes. In 2022, IRS employees answered only 16 percent of their calls (fewer than one out of six), and the average hold time for those who got through was 25 minutes.
The Taxpayer Advocate expects conditions for taxpayers and their accountants to improve over the course of the year, but it will take time. And what about all the fresh money heading to the IRS, thanks to Congress? The Advocate notes that “[m]ore than half the $80 billion over ten years in new] funding was earmarked for tax law enforcement.”
Meaning the IRS will be putting its resources into squeezing taxpayers, rather than answering its helpline. You can read the entire Taxpayer Advocate report here.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Exactly what has the IRS been doing with millions of dollars in appropriations it has previously gotten seems an appropriate question. How about some appropriate answers.
Yeah well, I fear this hypocrisy and double-standardising has been going on for several decades now, at least. Our ancestors fought hard to derail a privileged aristocracy according to birth and not by right or by merit. And now our benighted civilization has constructed and elevated a new oligarchic aristocracy who will trample on our sacred Constitution and inform us in due time what rights (if any) our new elitist government will allow us. Who are these oligrchs? Well, Georgie-Porgie, Bezos and Gates are excellent candidates, not to forget the Klaus man. Whoever they are, they are so convinced that they know better than Almighty God.
We need to figure out who exactly controls the Deep State. It’s the great mystery of our time. Multi-Billionaires like Soros would seem to be on or near the top of the list of Deep State leaders. The politicians are just their puppets. Who put together the list of the those to become Epstein’s guests at Pedophile Island?
Like most government agencies my biggest concern is the politicization they have undergone since at least the Clinton administration. Most are now enemies of the common working people and do the illegal bidding of their Deep State masters. FBI and DOJ are probably the most egregious examples, but the IRS is right up there too. BLM, DoE, DoD, DoJ—the list seems to be endless.