The Internal Revenue Service announced this week that it will begin accepting and processing 2022 tax year returns on January 23, 2023.
For most taxpayers, the deadline to file returns or request an extension to file or pay tax owed will be April 18, 2023, the Service said in a January 12 news release, noting that the traditional filing deadline—April 15—falls on a weekend, and the following Monday falls on Emancipation Day, which is a holiday in the District of Columbia.
The new filing season will begin as the IRS continues to churn through a backlog of unprocessed paper income tax returns from prior tax years—a result of the lingering effects of COVID-related staffing shortages and facilities shutdowns. (The agency’s website puts the number of unprocessed individual returns at 1.91 million as of December 23, 2022.)
IRS Acting Commissioner Doug O’Donnell noted in the release that the Service has hired more than 5,000 telephone support employees plus additional in-person staff ahead of the upcoming filing season using the new mandatory funds (roughly $80 billion over 10 years) allocated to the agency under the Inflation Reduction Act (P.L. 117-169), which was signed into law last August.
“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,” O’Donnell said. “With these new additional resources, taxpayers and tax professionals will see improvements in many areas of the agency this year. 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.”
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House this week approved legislation that would rescind the bulk of that new funding—primarily amounts related to enforcement and operations support—but would preserve roughly $9 billion that is allocated to taxpayer service and business systems modernization. The House-approved measure is not expected to be taken up in the Democratic-controlled Senate. (See separate coverage in this issue for additional details.)
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