How Well Did the Internal Revenue Service Do?

             The National Taxpayer Advocate is required to issue a report to Congress on how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is functioning. This would include positive points and where they need to improve. How do you think the IRS did in the tax filing season of 2021?

          The IRS completed 136 million income tax returns and issued 96 million refunds. This is very similar to what was done in 2019. (The year 2019 is used as a comparison because nothing can ever compare to 2020.) These efforts are made more impressive by the fact that the IRS also issued 3 rounds of Economic Impact Payments within 15 months. With this encouraging news, there are some areas that are in need of improvement.

          There is currently a backlog of 35 million individual and business tax returns that need to be processed. Almost half of them are on paper. Pandemic related rules that restricted employee access to IRS facilities kept employees from working on them. This is another reason to file electronically. Many Taxpayers are waiting for their tax refund or credit which will not be granted until their tax return is processed. The phone service received its worst rating ever. There were 167 million calls made to the IRS during the filing season this year, and only 7% reached an actual person. This volume of calls is 4 times greater than what was seen in 2019, but this is a problem that must be solved. The pandemic may have highlighted existing issues, and paved the way for finding solutions to them.

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