The National Taxpayer Advocate offered suggestions to Congress to assist IRS from digging out from under the burden – basically initiated by Congress and its lack of foresight and pandemic legislation that has tested IRS resources to the breaking point.
What are the issues:
- The year 2021 was the "most challenging year ever for taxpayers," whose phone calls to IRS support lines were answered only about 11% of the time.
- The IRS's Where's My Refund tool - accessed 632 million times last year - lacks information on unprocessed returns and provides no context on status delays.
- The IRS's shrunken workforce lacked the resources, manpower, and time to meet demand, leading to millions of refunds that have yet to reach taxpayers.
- Taxpayer assistance is sadly lacking.
To address its backlog of unprocessed previous-year tax returns and weak customer support, the IRS should offer higher pay to attract new employees and rely on short-term help from outside consultants. It has been challenging for IRS in recent years to boost staffing due in part to lack of a consistent budget and low pay.
The IRS has filled only 179 of the 5,000 positions opened to add to the roster of return processers. The submission-processing employees are typically hired at or around the federal government's GS-3 level, at which the base salary is $24,749. Even if new hires were offered better pay and incentives, it is feared the IRS will not be able to hire enough people to get them out of the hole, Congress and IRS has dug jointly.
Note: In 1986 the based salary for customer services “telephone” assistors was under $14,000. Considering inflation, that salary has not progress much as we enter 2022.
The Advocate as well as Congress have suggested increasing automation of IRS processes as another way to reduce the backlog and improve taxpayer service, but the IRS would need "sustained, multiyear" funding to modernize its systems. IRS operates on 1980’s technology.
IRS and the Paper Processing Problem
For the 2022 filing season, the IRS needs to process millions of remaining 2020 paper returns alongside incoming returns for 2021. IRS has dispatched 1,200 workers to sort through amended paper returns from the previous year and is setting up another specialized team to tackle the same task for this year’s returns.
There is no doubt that paper processing remains the agency’s biggest challenge, and that will continue throughout 2022. As of late December 2021, the IRS still had backlogs of 6 million unprocessed original individual returns (Form 1040 series) and 2.3 million unprocessed amended individual returns (Forms 1040-X). For original returns that were e-filed, the IRS has mostly worked through the backlog.
But the story is very different for paper returns, taxpayers have been experiencing significant delays in receiving their tax refunds because of unprecedented IRS backlogs in the processing of original and amended tax returns.
As of February 14, the IRS website reported that "all paper and electronic individual refund returns received prior to April 2021 have been processed if the return had no errors and did not require further review." The comment suggests that returns filed as far back as April 2021 are still awaiting processing.
Part of the backlog problem stems from the IRS suspending about 35 million returns due to errors - an increase of nearly 86% from previous years, mostly due the Recovery Rebate Credit – Economic Stimulus Payment matching.
The following recommendations have been made to ease many of the customer service problems in the short term:
- Prioritize the processing of original and amended paper tax returns through an "all hands-on-deck" strategy.
- Explore options to increase compensation for processing employees, minimize hiring lags, and use outside consultants to assist if necessary.
- Provide penalty relief for 2020 and 2021 tax returns.
- Suspend all automated collection notices until the IRS gets current in processing original and amended tax returns and taxpayer correspondence – IRS has acted on this issue.
- Add a dedicated team to accelerate the processing of claims for tentative refunds and employers' quarterly federal tax returns.
- Create and update a weekly "dashboard" on IRS.gov to provide the public with current and specific information about delays – the new Special Tax Season Alerts was created, see below.
The taxpayer advocate also testified about the need for sufficient multiyear funding of the IRS to modernize its information technology systems and outlined her recommendations to improve tax administration.
IRS Announces They Will Not Close the Austin Campus Processing Center
After receiving a letter from several members of Congress, including U.S. Reps. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), questioning its plans to close another return processing center, the IRS announced on February 17 that it will not be closing its Austin, TX, return processing center after all.
In 2016, the IRS announced its plans to close all but two of its return processing centers. The remaining processing centers would be Kansas City, MO, and Ogden, Utah. Under that plan, by the end of 2021 the IRS had closed all but three of its return processing centers: Austin, TX, Kansas City, MO, and Ogden, Utah. The IRS planned to close the Austin processing center by September 2024.
However, certain members of Congress concerned about how closing the Austin processing center would affect return processing and other issues, on February 17 sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. The letter noted that while electronic filing was increasing, the effort to close the Austin processing center "no longer made any sense - especially given the extensive paper backlog and hiring challenges that have plagued the IRS for the last two filing seasons." The letter asked the IRS to reconsider closing the Austin processing center until the current processing issues were addressed. In addition, an earlier TIGTA audit had found that the processing times for ITIN applications, which are processed only at the Austin center, have doubled over the past two years due to COVID-19 closures. This has led to increased wait times for applicants applying for an ITIN to pay their taxes or receive the Child Tax Credit (CTC) or advanced CTC.
The letter expressed concern that “closing the Austin Tax Processing Center will further delay the processing of applications for ITINs, as this facility is the only facility that processes ITIN applications. On the same day it received the letter, the IRS announced it was no longer planning on closing the Austin, TX processing center.
New IRS Web Page – Filing Season Updates - IR 2022-32, 2/14/2022
The IRS has added a page to its website for updates on the 2022 tax filing season as well as efforts by the agency to clear a backlog of unprocessed returns from past years. Special Tax Season Alerts