When Will the Irs Open Again
This year's tax filing season will begin on Monday. Most people have until April 18 this year to submit their returns. Patrick Sison/AP hide caption
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Patrick Sison/AP
This yr'south tax filing season will begin on Monday. Most people accept until April xviii this year to submit their returns.
Patrick Sison/AP
This Monday marks the beginning of tax filing season, when the IRS will begin accepting 2021 income revenue enhancement returns from individuals and businesses. Most people have until April 18 to submit them this year.
Every bit information technology starts to accept this yr'south returns, the IRS is still working through millions filed last twelvemonth. And that's just one of its problems.
"The service is in the roughest shape it's been in in 50 years," says Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner in the George Due west. Bush-league administration.
He says the agency is understaffed, has more than work than it can handle and is underfunded.
The result, he says, is the IRS has "huge backlogs right now that are unprocessed returns from prior years, refund requests, a lot of correspondence that hasn't even been opened and ... it's very tough to get through on the phone. So that'south a bad cocktail."
The IRS has its ain internal watchdog, the National Taxpayer Advocate. In her almanac report to Congress this month, the advocate, Erin Collins, said that in 2021, the agency had a backlog of some 35 1000000 returns that required manual processing. Taxpayers who called the IRS for guidance had merely a i in ix hazard of getting their calls answered.
"Among the lucky ane-in-9 callers who was able to reach a [customer service representative], the IRS reported that concord times averaged 23 minutes," according to the report, while also noting that practitioners and taxpayers have reported that hold times were frequently much longer.
She told NPR that taxpayers are annoyed.
"Information technology has been a very painful period of time, very frustrating, very hard for taxpayers," Collins said. "They can't get through to the IRS through phones, their newspaper correspondence have been piling upward, so it'southward very difficult for them to figure out what going on."
The IRS' computers are the oldest major tech systems in the federal authorities
Collins says the IRS' budget has declined by about 20% in the past 10 years while the number of revenue enhancement returns filed has gone upward xiii%. The agencies' computers are the oldest major tech systems in the federal regime.
At the same time, the IRS' workload has increased. In the last ii years, information technology has had to distribute three rounds of COVID-19 assistance payments to eligible Americans besides every bit the expanded child tax credit.
"That is far more than just processing returns. It's as well having to make sure that those refunds and those amounts go to the right bank accounts, and that people are properly filing their returns so that they can access those benefits in what is a time of economical emergency," says Caroline Bruckner, managing managing director of the Kogod Tax Policy Centre at American University.
And while Congress did provide extra money for the IRS to process those payments, Bruckner says the "one-off extra funding amounts aren't nearly enough to comprehend the long-standing funding issues that the IRS has, and to bargain with the personnel loss that they have accumulated over the last 10 years."
The White House agrees. On Friday, press secretary Jen Psaki called on lawmakers to boost funding for the service. The Biden administration's Build Back Better Act would provide boosted funding of $80 billion for the agency over x years. Merely that bundle's future is in incertitude, and lawmakers have yet to agree to a funding bill for the agency for the current fiscal yr.
Everson suggests IRS workers should go back to the role
Former Commissioner Everson, who's now vice chairman of the tax consulting firm alliantgroup, supports more funding for the IRS, just says that's a long-term consequence. In the meantime, ane thing the agency should do now, he says, is phone call IRS employees who take been working from home because of COVID-nineteen dorsum to the role.
"They should all hands to the pump at this time," he says. "They need to get everybody back in the office as soon every bit possible, so you just have more bodies working on these issues."
Collins' report offers suggestions to address taxpayer problems, including a adding a "customer callback" feature and so taxpayers don't accept to wait on hold and creating a filing flavor dashboard on IRS.gov that describes how long it is taking to procedure paper returns and the percentage of taxpayers who take called the IRS and gotten through.
So how should taxpayers deal with such a beleaguered bureau? The IRS says make sure all your documents are together when you start out working on your return and to file electronically.
There's also aid: Taxpayers who earn less than $58,000 a twelvemonth can go complimentary help filing from the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance. That program, along with another called Taxation Counseling for the Elderly, offers aid from IRS-certified volunteers.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1074793780/when-are-taxes-due-irs-phones-backlog
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