It’s Groundhog Day on the IRS.
After digging out of a frightening backlog from 2021, the company has an excellent larger backup for this tax season than it did a 12 months in the past and its tempo for processing paper returns is slowing down, in accordance with a watchdog report launched Wednesday.
The National Taxpayer Advocate, an impartial watchdog throughout the IRS, additionally mentioned taxpayers are experiencing longer wait occasions on the phone, and delays in processing paper returns have been working six months to at least one 12 months.
The report on taxpayer challenges, which should be submitted twice a 12 months to Congress, comes at some point after the Internal Revenue Service introduced that it’s on monitor to remove its 2021 backlog of tax returns this week.
The Objectives Report to Congress comprises proposals for lawmakers to contemplate going ahead.
“When I released my Annual Report to Congress six months ago, I wrote that ‘Paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite, and the agency is still buried in it,’” National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote within the report. “Fast forward to this Objectives Report: It’s Groundhog Day.”
She added: “At the end of May, the IRS had a larger backlog of paper tax returns than it did a year ago, and its pace of processing paper tax returns was slowing.”
Collins, who serves as an IRS ombudsman, mentioned of the company’s issues: “The math is daunting.”
According to the report, on the finish of May the company had a backlog of 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, a rise of 1.3 million over the identical time final 12 months. The company fell brief on its purpose to deliver on 5,473 new staff to course of returns, with simply 2,056 staff employed.
Additionally, telephone wait occasions elevated to 29 minutes on common, in contrast with final 12 months’s 20-minute common wait time.
“That the backlog continues to grow is deeply concerning, primarily because millions of taxpayers have been waiting six months or more to receive their refunds,” Collins mentioned.
Jodie Reynolds, a spokesperson for the IRS, pushed again, claiming the report’s numbers “are neither the most accurate nor most recent figures.”
“Today, the IRS is running well ahead of tax return processing compared to a year ago,” Reynolds mentioned. “The IRS continues to make substantial progress on the inventory,” bringing on new contractors, shifting workers and mandating worker time beyond regulation, she mentioned.
Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, mentioned “no one feels the pressure about backlogs more than the front-line workers who have been plowing through that paperwork for months now.”
He mentioned the IRS is “in desperate need of more staffing, more resources and updated technology, all of which are necessary to prevent future backlogs.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”