Commissioner Chuck Rettig of the Internal Revenue Service cautioned on Tuesday that the agency’s large backlog of unprocessed returns could lead to a difficult tax season.
Rettig recognized that millions of Americans are still waiting for prior year’s tax returns to be processed and refund cheques to arrive in the mail in an op-ed for Yahoo News, but pledged to return to normal inventory levels before next year.
Despite the fact that the IRS has already issued 4 million refunds totaling $10 billion, taxpayers can expect a complicated and time-consuming tax season due to an IRS worker shortage, the Herculean task of administering massive amounts of stimulus checks and adapting to other pandemic-related tax changes, as well as a massive backlog of unprocessed paper returns, according to Rettig.
“Millions are waiting for their returns to be processed, and many won’t be able to reach us when they call with questions this filing season. This is frustrating for taxpayers and for us,” Rettig wrote. “We want to do more, but we face great challenges.”
