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.
Ahead of the 2023 tax season, which has a midnight Tuesday
filing deadline, the IRS hired 5,000 new taxpayer service agents
to cut down call waiting times, and with the new scanning
technology, it was able to clear the backlog of all error-free
returns, Werfel said, leaving only those with questions, audits
or other issues to be resolved.
A U.S. Treasury spokesperson said the IRS ended 2022 with a
backlog of 1.4 million unprocessed individual and business
returns and those were cleared by mid-March.
Including the new 5,000 taxpayer services personnel, the IRS
plans to hire some nearly 20,000 new staff over two years as it
deploys new funding from the climate-focused Inflation Reduction
Act.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have targeted
the $80 billion in new IRS funding as part of their spending cut
demands in exchange for raising the $31.4 trillion U.S. debt
ceiling.
The funding, aimed at beefing up enforcement and audits for
wealthy taxpayers and business partnerships, modernizing
computer systems and improving taxpayer services, comes on top
of the agency's annual operating budget.
Werfel said the funding was making an "immediate, meaningful
difference to deliver the service American taxpayers deserve on
the phone, in person and online" with more improvements in
coming years.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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