WASHINGTON — During this tax season you’ve been hearing countless stories about how many Hoosiers are still waiting for confirmation that their taxes from previous years have been processed by the IRS.
It’s 2022 now and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), while speaking in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday, said that many Hoosiers he’s spoken with say they are still waiting on returns to come back from the IRS for their 2020 taxes.
He said the backlog is immense and that there are many reasons for it from what he has observed.
“In many cases printers (at IRS locations) because the ink cartridges were out and no one bothered to replace them,” Young said in the hearing. “Now, I understand that a number of these printer issues occurred at the Kansas City processing center, where most of my constituents’ IRS submissions end up.”
Young questioned Erin Collins during the hearing. Collins is the National Taxpayer Advocate within the IRS. Put simply, she is there to advocate for taxpayers and it is her job within the IRS to make sure the agency knows what it needs to do to meet the needs of taxpayers.
Collins said the main causes of the backlog of returns are paper and a lack of manpower.
“Part of the challenge are resources,” she said. “We just do not have enough employees to move it through quickly. Paper really is the challenge. We do not have an automated process to move that through the system quickly. We need to solve the paper problem.”
Which is the main reason why you hear nowadays that the IRS prefers you file electronically.
