From the Washington Post:
IRS faces 35 million unprocessed tax returns as backlog swells, watchdog says
Taxpayer call volumes also rise dramatically as customer service responsiveness plummets and backlog mounts
By
Jeff Stein
June 30, 2021 at 5:59 p.m. EDT
The Internal Revenue Service closed the most recent filing season with more than 35 million in unprocessed tax returns, as the agency’s backlog grew markedly amid a
crush of challenges related to the pandemic and economic relief efforts, a government watchdog said Wednesday.
Erin Collins, the National Taxpayer Advocate,
said in her report that about 17 million paper tax returns are still waiting to be processed and approximately 16 million additional returns have been placed on hold because they require further review manually. Another 2.7 million amended tax returns have not been processed.
This backlog represents a fourfold increase from 2019 — the most recent year before the
coronavirus pandemic — when the IRS closed its filing season with 7.4 million unprocessed returns, according to the report. These numbers reflect the IRS backlog as of May, and the agency may have made progress reducing it since then. The IRS backlog amounted to 11 million at the end of the 2020 filing season, fewer than a third of the current number of unprocessed returns.