The IRS will fail to meet its self-imposed year-end deadline to solve a massive backlog of unprocessed tax returns, according to a new government report.
"The delays in processing backlogged tax returns continue to burden taxpayers," the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said Thursday in a statement.
"Our assessment of the remaining inventory and increased production levels indicates that the IRS will not meet all of its goals by the end of Calendar Year 2022 and will continue to have a backlog into the 2023 Filing Season."
The IRS issued a statement saying the IG report "does not reflect our most recent progress," The Washington Times reported.
"Much work has been done in the last several weeks and will continue to be done in the weeks ahead to make progress to address the remaining inventory and to ensure that the agency does not face such challenges in the future."
The IRS did not say if it would meet its year-end deadline to get "healthy," which refers to pre-pandemic levels.
The backlog grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, as shutdown orders and changes in tax filings left the agency with a glut of returns and difficulty in processing them.
The issue peaked in June at 20.5 million returns, and was reduced to 10.5 million near the end of October.
Although IRS management in November told TIGTA that it believed the backlog would return to pre-pandemic levels for both individual and business paper tax returns by the end of December, TIGTA said in the report that it remained "concerned that business paper returns will not be healthy" at the end 2022.
The report said that the IRS added 5,000 new employees at its processing centers, shifted workers and brought on contractors to help deal with the backlog.
In November, it was reported that millions of Americans continued to wait for 2021 tax year refunds due to the backlog of returns.
"I look at the numbers and see millions of taxpayers that are still waiting for their returns to be processed," National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote via the NTA blog.
"As of Oct. 21, the IRS had about three million individual returns and north of four million business returns awaiting initial processing, as well as about two million amended individual and business returns."
The Times reported that more than 80% of taxpayers who phoned the IRS for help this year had their calls go unanswered, and people who did get through sat on hold for lengthy periods of time.
As late as September, 400,000 pieces of correspondence from 2021 still hadn’t been handled, the Times said.
The IRS was allotted $80 billion by Democrat lawmakers in August to beef up its staff, increase enforcement against tax cheats and modernize its systems.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.