On one hand, the IRS wants to get the credits of up to $26,000 to employers who need the financial boost. But on the other, it has received a large number of fraudulent returns, which has made the IRS’s “Dirty Dozen” list of tax scams this year.

"The influx of fraudulent claims has put the IRS between a rock and a hard place," Collins wrote in her report to Congress.

Processing individual amended returns was averaging about seven months at the end of the 2023 tax filing season. The number of unprocessed individual amended returns dropped to 1.7 million this year, down from 2.6 million at the end of the 2022 season. But the number of unprocessed business amended returns rose to 1.7 million from 1.1 million.

The IRS made substantial progress on its backlog of unprocessed 1040 returns left over from 2022. It reduced the 13.3 million 1040s from the end of last season to 2.6 million at the end of this year’s season. However, the total grew to 4.1 million as of June 3.

While the IRS reached its goal of 85 percent “Level of Service” on account management telephone lines, overall, it answered only 35 percent of calls received. According to the press release from the advocate’s “the report details, the LOS measure does not account for the significant majority of taxpayer calls and is not the best measure of overall service levels.”

The public statement says the agency the “IRS has not made notable progress in reducing its paper AM inventories over the past year.”  In April, the IRS took 130 days to process adjustment cases, a substantial improvement from2 14 days last year. However, the IRS’s standard processing time is 45 days.

And ID theft cases have worsened. to nearly 15 months for the average cycle time for Identity Theft Victim Assistance cases closed in April 2023. That compared to a 362-day cycle time for cases closes in April 2022.

Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind