The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has laid out a plan to end the large pandemic backlog of unprocessed tax returns.
The biggest part of the plan is to hire 10,000 new IRS employees to tackle the backlog. The IRS will hold job fairs across the country in March in Kansas City (March 18-19), Austin (March 24-25), and Ogden (March 31-April 1) to fill 5,000 open positions in the coming months. The IRS has secured direct hiring authority for these sites.
An additional 5,000 new hires will be made over the next year. Onboarding and training will begin within just a few weeks of hire.
“IRS employees have been working tirelessly to process backlogged returns and taxpayer correspondence. To ensure inventory is back to a healthy level for next filing season, we are leaving no stone unturned—taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure as many employees as possible are dedicating time to return processing,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said. “This includes bringing on new employees and reassigning current IRS employees to process inventory.”
Millions of taxpayers are still awaiting the processing of their tax returns and receipt of their refunds, creating one of the most challenging tax filing seasons in U.S. history. The backlog challenges stem from two key sources. One, the IRS has been underfunded for more than a decade, with its budget cut by nearly 20 percent since 2010. Two, the pandemic created a unique set of new operational challenges for the IRS as the agency was called upon to support emergency relief for taxpayers, like distributing an unprecedented three rounds of Economic Impact Payments to 85 percent of American households.
“Since the pandemic began, IRS employees have been called on to go above and beyond for the American people, and they have met the moment. But they’ve had to do so without adequate resources and funding, which is why the agency faces the challenges that it does today. The Biden Administration is committed to getting the IRS the stable, long-term funding it needs to be able to serve the American people,” Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said.
In addition to hiring 10,000 new employees, the IRS is creating a 700-person surge team to process new returns. These efforts will address the historically high inventories of paper tax returns. At full capacity, this surge will close millions of cases each month. Also, the IRS has required mandatory overtime for the over 6,000 employees processing original returns. Further, the IRS is quickly pursuing additional contracting options to help with original return processing. The IRS is also expanding its customer service capabilities to help people with questions about filing their taxes.