The IRS backlog has grown worse over the last year and millions of returns filed on paper this year have yet to be touched by the agency, the country’s official taxpayer advocate told Congress in a new report Wednesday.
They could be waiting up to 10 months to get their refunds, said National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins.
As of late last month, the IRS was sitting on a pile of 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, at least 10.5 million of them filed by individual taxpayers. Both numbers were worse than at the same point in 2021, the advocate said.