Tax season has started, but the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is warning that there may be delays in processing refunds due to the pandemic, several tax law changes and fewer employees.
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The 2022 tax filing season started Jan. 24 and more than 160 million individual tax returns for the 2021 tax year are expected to be filed, with most before the April 18 tax deadline, according to the IRS.
Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Natasha Sarin said the agency is operating with “thousands fewer employees than it needs,” CBS reported. In addition, a report by the National Taxpayer Advocate revealed the IRS received 282 million phone calls from taxpayers last year, but was only able to answer about 11% of them, according to CBS.
Sarin told CBS that phone wait times could be even longer this year, as the pandemic has limited the number of agents available. “The IRS isn’t going to be able to answer as many of those calls as it should be able to,” she told CBS. “We know that that’s going to be hugely frustrating for taxpayers in a complex filing season in the middle of a pandemic.”
To further complicate the matter, the IRS is also still working through backlogs, CBS reported, as early in the pandemic, some of the tax processing centers were closed entirely, which stopped the processing of some returns in 2020. And they’re trying to catch up using outdated methods. Earlier...
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