IRS BACKLOG UPDATE

[Lee B]

"According to the IRS website, as of July 31, there were approximately 13.8 million unprocessed individual income tax returns. This is down from 15.6 million as of July 17, so the backlog is being chipped away slowly but surely,” said James McGrory, a CPA and shareholder at Drucker & Scaccetti in Philadelphia."

[Max W]

At that rate it will take over 4 months to process the rest before a slug of new returns come prior to the Oct deadline.   

[mcb39]

I have at least one 2019 that has not been processed yet.  Still, they want money from him for 2020 when he had money applied from 2019.  Cannot make any verbal contact.

[B. Jani]

I have 2 amendment paper filed last year waiting to be processed. Both have refund. I have no confidence 13 million will be processed by end of year.

[Catherine]

8 hours ago, mcb39 said:

I have at least one 2019 that has not been processed yet.  Still, they want money from him for 2020 when he had money applied from 2019.  Cannot make any verbal contact.

They may refuse to apply 2019 funds to 2020 and refund those.  There's a time limit, and I have no idea if they are paying attention to that (or not) to the regular cut-off times when the backlog is on them.

[Lee B]

In addition there were also 281,000 unprocessed business tax returns according to the TIGTA Report

[Lee B]

News Reports yesterday say that the IRS Backlog is now down to 8.5 Million Tax Returns. which are now all returns which will require manual intervention.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service says that their caseload has increased about 50 % and that if you call them that the average wait time on hold is about 80 minutes.

[TexTaxToo]

20 hours ago, cbslee said:

which are now all returns which will require manual intervention.

I don't think that's correct.  Current status of the backlog is available here:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-operations-during-covid-19-mission-critical-functions-continue

which is where the 8.5M number came from.  Further details were communicated here:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/operationsstatus.pdf

Highlights:

Quote

As of early September, the IRS has processed all error-free paper and electronically filed individual tax returns received prior to April 2021. We continue to reduce the inventory of the remaining individual tax returns by about a million a week even as more tax year 2020 returns continue coming in prior to the Oct. 15 extension deadline. For tax returns that need additional manual review, we’re on target to being back to our normal processing pace by the end of 2021.

From January 1 through August 11, 2021, the IRS manually made about 11 million math error corrections, around 9.1 million of which were related to the RRC. By comparison, for the same time in 2020, the IRS had far fewer tax returns with issues; under nearly 1 million math error corrections occurred during that time period.

As of September 4, 2021, the IRS had 780,000 individual returns in manual review

 

 

[Lee B]

I was quoting news articles which are of course 100 % correct

I followed your links but what is your point ?

[TexTaxToo]

No criticism intended!  The point is just clarification that the number of returns under manual review was only 780,000 - not the entire 8.5 million backlog.  Even so, it will take the rest of the year to clear them.