The IRS has launched an emergency effort to clear its deep backlog of unprocessed mail and amended tax returns by temporarily reassigning 1,200 of its employees.
The backlog is at the root of a cascade of problems for both taxpayers and the IRS. Tax professionals have reported widespread issues with the agency’s system sending automated notices yet not processing taxpayer responses. That in turn requires tax professionals to call the already overwhelmed IRS phone lines for assistance, which isn’t often readily obtained.
The 2022 filing season began January 24, but the IRS’s accounts management function “is still facing unprecedented inventory levels,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in a February 2 internal email to employees. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he said. “The bottom line is we need this help.”
The 1,200 IRS employees — many of whom were selected because they had prior experience in accounts management within the last two fiscal years as customer service representatives, clerks, and tax examiners — will be part of an “inventory surge team” that the agency expects to be in place through the end of September, Rettig said.
The National Treasury Employees Union is on board with the plan, with NTEU President Tony Reardon saying in a statement that his organization “will not stand in the way.”
“Also, to state the obvious, this large-scale reassignment of employees is a temporary fix at best and wouldn't be necessary if the IRS — after a decade of budget and staffing cuts — had the funding and the resources it needs to address the increased workload affecting every division of the agency,” Reardon said.
The IRS’s ongoing inventory backlog was the top concern listed in National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins’s most recent report to Congress, released January 12. In the report, Collins warned that the backlog and the problems stemming from it were “harming millions of taxpayers,” and urged the agency to prioritize the processing of paper returns and tax refunds, “realigning resources if necessary.”
The American Institute of CPAs also praised the move in a February 3 statement, calling it, and the IRS’s decision last week to suspend one type of automated notice, “positive steps in the right direction.” But the group said the IRS can and should do more, citing the recommendations in a January 27 letter that it, along with a coalition of other groups representing tax professionals, sent to the IRS. The letter called on the IRS to temporarily suspend all automated compliance actions and provide penalty relief for tax years 2020 and 2021, among other recommendations.
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