The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic upon supply chains and prices has been much commented upon. Less well known is that the pandemic caused the development of a major backlog at the IRS. As of the end of August 2022, some 8.2 million individual tax returns remained unprocessed.

But according to a November 2022 update, major progress had been made. The number of unprocessed returns had been cut to 4.2 million. According to the IRS, “These include tax year 2021 returns and late filed prior year returns. Of these, 1.9 million returns require error correction or other special handling, and 2.3 million are paper returns waiting to be reviewed and processed.”

There were also an estimated 900,000 unprocessed amended tax returns in November 2022, filed on Form 1040-X. They are processed in the order received, and processing can take up to 20 weeks, the IRS reports.  Taxpayers may get status reports on their amended returns by going to “Where’s My Amended Return?” at the IRS website (https://www.irs.gov/filing/wheres-my-amended-return).

All this progress is welcome, but a whole new tax season is about to begin. The major additional funding for the IRS enacted by Congress in 2022 may help to alleviate such problems and reduce delays in the future.

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