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IRS Third-Party Authorizations Are Taking 3 Weeks

Posted on July 28, 2020

Third-party authorizations now take about 15 business days for the IRS to process — exceeding the agency’s previous target of five business days — because of site closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agency on July 27 updated its webpage on operations during the pandemic, which includes the new time frame and discourages taxpayers from sending duplicate filings because they will cause further delays.

The IRS is working on a way to accept digital signatures for Form 8821, “Tax Information Authorization,” and Form 2848, “Power of Attorney and Declaration of Representative,” by early 2021, according to the update, which added that the agency “acknowledges the burden on taxpayers and the tax professional community to apply physical signatures to forms, especially during these unprecedented times.”

The IRS said earlier in July that its Centralized Authorization File (CAF) unit in Memphis, Tennessee, had become operational after stating in a June 10 update that only the CAF unit in Ogden, Utah, was operational. The IRS facility in Ogden was one of three facilities that reopened on June 1, along with others in Texas and Kentucky.

Practitioners have called the pandemic-related interruptions to the IRS’s CAF system — which processes powers of attorney and other representative authorizations — a problem.

Earlier this year, the IRS acknowledged that it had started experiencing delays in CAF system administration and processing existing income verification express services requests, and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig issued an agency evacuation order on March 27.

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