IRS Backlog
On July 1, 2021 Erin Collins from the Taxpayer Advocate's office released her annual IRS report. Here are the highlights that we feel are important for taxpayers to know: • The IRS has a current backlog of 35 million unprocessed individual and business tax returns that require manual processing. This is more than 5 times as many as were manually processed in 2019.
- A little less than half of the backlog is paper tax returns awaiting processing and most of the remaining tax returns were suspended during processing and require further review.
- Ms. Collins observed that the only thing most taxpayers can do is wait for the backlog to clear!
- Also worth mentioning is that there was a sharp increase in the number of returns flagged as suspicious: 3.7 million as of May 2021, compared with just 1.3 million in all of 2019.
• The IRS received more phone calls during the 2021 filing season than it had ever received in a full fiscal year, with over four times as many calls as in the prior filing season.
- The IRS’s highest-volume phone line for individual income tax assistance clocked roughly 85 million calls, only 3 percent of which went through to a live IRS customer service representative.
Unfortunately tax preparers do not have a magical connection to the IRS so we are in the same boat as taxpayers when trying to contact the IRS. Our hope is that this will be a 2020/2021 issue and that the IRS will clear the backlog no later than 2022 Tax Filing Season.