04/18/2023

IRS Clears Massive Backlog of Unprocessed Paper Tax Returns

The COVID pandemic led to significant filing delays

On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) declared that it is completing its first "normal" tax filing season since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, with a backlog of millions of unprocessed returns from previous years fully cleared.

New IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told reporters that the initial spending of $80 billion in new IRS funding helped purchase new scanning technology that has allowed paper returns to be digitized and quickly processed.

The COVID pandemic led to a three-month filing delay in 2020 followed by a one-month delay in 2021. The delays collided with staffing shortages to pile up a massive backlog of some 23.5 million individual and business tax returns by February 2022 that needed some form of manual processing, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate's office.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Reuters.