We reviewed the IRS 2022 Filing Season and this is What We Found

Jessica Lucas Judy discusses our December report on IRS's 2022 tax season performance. In its third filing season since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) prioritized processing its backlog of tax returns but its current inventory of unprocessed returns remains high. At the end of 2021, IRS had a backlog of about 10.5 million paper returns and returns stopped for errors. The IRS addressed its backlog of 2021 paper returns. However, as of late September 2022, IRS had about 12.4 million returns to process, resulting in refund delays for millions of taxpayers. GAO previously recommended that IRS improve paper processing by digitizing more paper returns and addressing barriers to e-filing.