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irs: short on time and running out of room

the situation isn’t funny, but laughing beats crying.

by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间

half the country may be vaxxed to the max, but that hasn’t helped the irs recover from last year’s covid-clogged backlog. in fact, it’s gotten so bad that the backlog is causing a logjam that’s backing up more logs.

more: 173% increase in irs correspondence backlog | hunker down: the irs backlog isn’t going away anytime soon | the irs studebaker bomb | irs has recruiting problems, too
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when tax clients start to gripe about the refunds they haven’t received, maybe not even last year’s, describe this scenario to them, as described by the interim results of the 2021 filing season report from the treasury inspector general for tax administration.

it’s the paper, stupid

  • the irs has been keeping up with digital returns, but millions of paper returns from last year are still waiting to be processed. the carryover of 8.3 million returns and transactions was 1,200 percent higher than usual.
  • millions more paper returns are pouring in.
  • as of march, more than 31,000 boxes of processed returns need to be transferred to a federal records center, but the centers were still closed because of covid-19. (as of may, they are being gradually reopened according to the local pandemic situation.) .
  • the irs also needed some of the processed returns that were in a closed frc. on march 1, the irs was waiting for 70,000 tax return requests to be fulfilled.
  • with so many boxes, the irs has too little room for this year’s incoming returns.

bring in the trailers

  • many of the boxes and new unprocessed returns have to be stored in trailers.
  • there’s too little room at a given loading dock, so trailers have to be swapped around several times a day. some have to be unloaded and then reloaded before the next trailer can be brought in. (the center at ogden, utah, has 12 such trailers.)
  • one mitigating strategy was to transfer returns to other tax processing centers, but the one in fresno, calif., is due to close in september.

wanted: staff

  • despite the overload of paper, the irs is woefully short on staff. on march 5, the onset of the tax season, 4,434 “submission processing functions” remained unfilled.
  • at the end of 2020, some 4 million taxpayer questions about tax laws, tax accounts and refund status remained unanswered. by march 20, 2021, the number was over 5.1 million.

and then the copiers went down …

meanwhile, printers and copiers are breaking down. of 164 devices used for submission processing that the tigfta looked at, 69 (42 percent) were unusable, and others were broken but functioning. many could not be used for lack of toner. others could not be used because waste cartridge containers were full. the contract for printers and supplies ended in september of last year. a new contract was signed in october, but contractors have not been coming in to replace old printers because of covid-19 concerns.

without copiers, staff cannot fulfill requests for tax documents, exacerbating the pileup of unprocessed returns.

your call is important to us! (but not very.)

this year, as of march 5, taxpayers made nearly 46.3 million attempts to call the irs. robots dealt with 7.6 million of them. people answered more than 4.4 million. that left a good 34 million calls unanswered. average speed of answers was 18 minutes, way up from the 10 minutes of 2020.

meanwhile …

  • of 358 walk-in taxpayer assistance centers, 72 have yet to open following last year’s covid-19 shutdown. still, the irs expects to assist 1.5 million tac visitors in 2021, a 41.1 percent increase over last year.
  • the irs also offers virtual service delivery using video and audio technology. delivery was effected by 30 community partners last year. as of feb. 28 this year, only one is active, and as of that date, no taxpayers had used it.
  • the irs also offers assistance at six social security offices, but the offices are all closed this year, so as of feb. 28, no one had used the service.
  • the number of volunteer program sites has withered from 9,663 in 2020 to 7,354 in 2021, a 23.9 percent decline. the number of returns processed as of march 7 in both years declined 66.5 percent, from 1,684,574 to 565,123.

the tigfta report did not make any recommendations.

2 responses to “irs: short on time and running out of room”

  1. kathleen gedrich

    i pay more into my taxes than i have to as a”savings account”. we are retired and disabled and desperately need our refund. i paid my taxes on time and i expect my refund on time. most of the irs issues were anticipatory, and this should have been a priority. much blame goes to the former administration. now that he’s gone, i hope the new administration gets the irs the budget and new hires it needs. people like us can’t afford to wait.

  2. brenda l knapp

    i was sickened just to read all of this mess. i know how hard it is to take care of my clients’ tax issues because you cannot get anyone on the phone, and written correspondence continues to be delayed. and still the penalty and threatening letters continue. there should not be one penalty charged until the irs gets itself fixed. congress has habitually cut their funding and, like the postal service, has deliberately made a mess of the irs and its functions.