There’s a glimmer of hope for frustrated taxpayers who have been unable to reach the Internal Revenue Service or have had their tax refunds held up by massive processing backlogs.
The IRS has a backlog of roughly 20 million returns, leaving some people waiting months or even years to receive refunds or resolve disputes. The agency said Thursday it hopes to get it below 1 million by the end of 2022.
The agency is rolling out new automated tools both on phone lines and online chat boxes to help people get answers to basic tax questions so they don’t need to wait for hours. The IRS also expanded the use of call-back technology to 70% of toll-free service lines, which has saved taxpayers more than 1 million hours of waiting on hold so far this fiscal year, the agency said.
The IRS also has hired new workers and redeployed other employees to expedite tax form processing.
“To ensure inventory is back to a healthy level for next filing season, we are leaving no stone unturned — taking an all hands-on-deck approach to ensure as many employees as possible are dedicating time to return processing,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a statement.
The efforts could represent a turnaround for an agency that has been struggling to perform basic tax administration and taxpayer service tasks after years of budget cuts and lingering backlogs stemming from the pandemic.
The plans include hiring 10,000 new workers, requiring 6,000 employees to work overtime, and offering up to 10,000 employees the option to work more hours. The IRS is using contractors to help answer taxpayers questions and help process the inventory of returns that has piled up.
However, that relief may be temporary. The agency is likely to continue to face staffing shortages and structural problems in the future.
“Ultimately, these approaches are short-term salves for 2022’s tax season but don’t address the much deeper structural problem at the IRS,” according to a Treasury and IRS joint statement. “The agency needs stable, long-term funding to be able to modernize outdated technological infrastructure and transition much of its manual work into automated processes that will be more efficient.”
So far, the IRS has kept up with the tax returns submitted this filing season. The agency has processed about 43.8 million returns so far this year and issued about 29.7 million refunds, ahead of where they were at this point last year. The average refund is $3,473, according to the most recent IRS data.
The filing deadline for most taxpayers this year is April 18.
