Over 35M tax returns unprocessed as IRS struggles, watchdog says

The Internal Revenue Service was still facing a backlog of more than 35 million unprocessed tax returns as of the end of the 2021 filing season in May — a pileup more than four times bigger than the end of the 2019 filing season, according to a government watchdog.

The National Taxpayer Advocate found in its annual Objectives Report that the most recent tax filing season “was perhaps the most challenging filing season taxpayers, tax professionals, and the IRS have ever experienced.” The watchdog said the agency had 35.3 million unprocessed returns at the end of the 2021 filing season, up more than four-fold from the 7.4 million unprocessed returns the agency had at the end of the 2019 filing season.