Americans can start filing their income tax returns Jan. 24, but existing backlogs and longstanding operational problems at the IRS, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, are likely to make for a frustrating filing season for taxpayers and tax preparers, a Treasury Department official said Monday.
The IRS is still dealing with backups in processing returns from the past two filing seasons. While the tax collector typically has about about 1 million pieces of unopened mail, including tax returns, in its backlog when starting a new filing season, it had 6 million unprocessed individual returns as of Dec. 23, the most recent date for which data is available on the agency’s website.
More than 150 million individual income tax returns typically roll in over the course of a few months.
Tax returns for 2021 are due April 18 for most individual filers, a few days after the normal April 15 deadline due to a holiday in Washington, D.C., though extensions can be requested. This year’s start and end dates, announced by the IRS on Monday, are more in line with historical norms, which have been upended since 2020 because of the pandemic.
Last year, the IRS held off the start date to Feb. 12, to give the agency extra time to reprogram operations based on tax law changes passed in late 2020.
There haven’t been any discussions about delaying the deadline beyond this April, the Treasury official said, though that’s happened each of the last two years when the due date was reset to May 17, 2021, and July 15, 2020.
Disruptions from the ongoing pandemic have been made worse by years of budget cuts, a shrinking workforce and outdated technologies at the IRS. President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress want to boost spending on the IRS to improve enforcement and other agency functions like customer service, but the Treasury official blamed Republicans for blocking fresh funding.
To improve odds of faster tax return and refund processing, taxpayers should take several steps, including filing electronically and providing direct deposit information rather than requesting paper checks for a return, the official said.
