IRS PROMISING IMPROVEMENTS THIS TAX SEASON

The U.S. tax filing season will begin Jan. 23 and run through April 18 with, perhaps, less frustration for both taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service than in recent years.

The 12-week time frame to submit IRS forms is an annual and often dreaded American tradition marked by a nationwide rush to gather paperwork and comb through the complicated tax code, usually with the help of software or an accountant or other professional.

This year, however, should be a better experience for taxpayers, with the IRS receiving additional funding, adding 5,000 customer service representatives, and reducing a large backlog of tax returns that had slowed down the agency.

Still, the IRS recommends filing electronically and opting for direct deposit for the quickest refund.

“This filing season is the first to benefit the IRS and our nation’s tax system from multi-year funding in the Inflation Reduction Act,” Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’donnell said in a statement. “We’ve trained thousands of new employees to answer phones and help people. While much work remains after several difficult years, we expect people to experience improvements this tax season.”

Taxpayers will get a few extra days — until Tuesday, April 18 — to file this year because the normal April 15 deadline falls on a Saturday, and the following Monday is the Emancipation Day holiday in Washington, D.C.

This year is a return to relative normal for the IRS and taxpayers alike. Most of the coronavirus pandemic aid — including stimulus payments, larger child tax credits, and business stimulus - that was administered through the tax code has expired.

The IRS also enters this tax season with a much smaller backlog of individual and business returns. It has struggled for the past two years to process forms that piled up while some agency operations closed for a few months in 2020 because of the pandemic.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen intends for the agency to offer better customer service this year. She set a goal for the IRS to answer 85 percent of telephone calls during this filing season. That figure plummeted to a historic low of about 10 percent during the 2021 filing season.

Yellen has also called for phone wait times to be cut to less than 15 minutes, down from nearly 30 minutes. She also said Treasury would triple the number of taxpayers served in-person at assistance centers and automate scanning of millions of returns to speed up refund turnaround times.

Taxpayers who are unable to submit their paperwork by April 18 can file for a six-month extension, but they are still required to pay anything they owe by the deadline to avoid penalties and interest.

Although Yellen and others have long said that the IRS needed more money to be effective, Republicans now in control of the House last week voted to rescind tens of billions of dollars in funding that Democrats approved last year that, over a decade, would be spent to bolster auditing, customer service and computer systems.

The bill has no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the dispute is likely to become a bargaining chip at the center of upcoming debates over raising the debt ceiling and funding the federal government.

MATTHEW BUSCH THE WASHINGTON POST The IRS is entering this tax season with a much smaller backlog of individual and business returns. It has struggled for the past two years to process forms that piled up because of the pandemic.