For the most part, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins praised the IRS for its handling of the 2026 filing season, as the agency processed nearly 139 million individual tax returns, issued more than 90 million refunds, and implemented extensive tax law changes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act despite significant operational challenges, including a 27% reduction to its workforce. But in her midyear report to Congress, Collins also noted areas where the IRS still fell short, including taxpayers experiencing refund delays and service challenges, including returns suspended during processing for additional review, delays in receiving paper refund checks, and prolonged case resolution times for victims of identity theft.
The report, released on Wednesday, also includes Collins’ main priorities for the IRS as the agency continues to update its technology.
“Entering the 2026 filing season, there was considerable uncertainty about the IRS’s ability to successfully manage a convergence of major challenges: implementation of sweeping new tax legislation, significant workforce reductions, and extensive leadership turnover,” she wrote. “In the end, the IRS performed better than expected in most respects. The vast majority of taxpayers filed their returns successfully and received their refunds without significant delay. IRS leadership and its workforce deserve substantial credit for that accomplishment, particularly given the extraordinary operational pressures they overcame. But taxpayers who required assistance from the IRS often struggled to get it.”
Filing season 2026 stats recap
Collins credits the IRS’s continued technology transformation efforts as a primary driver of its success. By the end of the filing season, the IRS had processed about 139 million Forms 1040 and about 98% had been submitted electronically. About 65% of those returns resulted in refunds, and about 98% of refunds were delivered by direct deposit. As a result, the significant majority of returns were processed via automation and without issue, allowing most taxpayers to file their returns and receive their refunds without delay, the report says.
Figure 1: Individual Tax Return Statistics for the 2026 Filing Season
| Return/Refund Category | Filing Season 2026 |
|---|---|
| Individual Returns Received | 140,222,000 |
| Individual Returns Processed | 138,567,000 |
| Refunds Issued | 90,411,000 |
| Average Refund Amount | $3,275 |
| Refunds Issued by Direct Deposit | 90,781,000 |
[Note: IRS data on “Refunds Issued” and “Refunds Issued by Direct Deposit” is not directly comparable. “Refunds Issued” includes only current-year refunds, while “Refunds Issued by Direct Deposit” includes refunds issued for prior tax years as well.]
Continued improvements in online accounts provided valuable self-service options for taxpayers, she noted. Taxpayers logged into their Individual Online Accounts nearly 121 million times during the filing season, while the IRS expanded account functionality to allow taxpayers to upload documents in response to certain notices, receive refund status notifications, update direct deposit information in some circumstances, and access additional account information. Taxpayers used their online accounts to view tax documents needed to prepare their returns, accessing information returns more than 3.7 million times.
Taxpayers also made extensive use of the IRS’s refund-tracking tools. During the filing season, taxpayers checked the status of their refunds through the IRS’s Where’s My Refund? tool about 346 million times, a 9% increase from the prior year, according to the report.
“The IRS is often held up as the poster child for antiquated government technology infrastructure, and there is certainly some truth to that characterization. But the IRS has been improving its technology year by year, and as long as it gets the IT right, most taxpayers file their returns and receive their refunds without delay,” Collins said in the report.
What challenges did taxpayers face?
While most taxpayers didn’t encounter problems, the report says, “aggregate statistics do not tell the whole story.”
“For millions of taxpayers, the filing season was frustrating, confusing, and financially disruptive,” Collins said in the report. “Some taxpayers whose returns were frozen by IRS filters waited weeks or months for refunds they depended on to pay rent, buy groceries, or cover medical expenses. Taxpayers calling certain IRS telephone lines often could not reach a live employee despite repeated attempts. Victims of identity theft continued to face unacceptable delays that, in many cases, stretched close to two years. Lower-income and unbanked taxpayers seeking paper refund checks encountered obstacles and delays that left many feeling shut out of a system that should work for everyone.”
Refund delays
Even during a successful filing season, millions of returns are frozen by IRS processing filters and subjected to review. This filing season, more than 14 million individual income tax returns were suspended during processing, the report shows. More than 1 million taxpayers didn’t receive their refunds within the IRS’s normal processing time, experiencing an average wait of about five and a half weeks. A significant but unknown number of taxpayers experienced shorter refund delays that fell within normal processing times.
Telephone and correspondence processing challenges
Taxpayers had more difficulty reaching the IRS by phone during the 2026 filing season than the previous filing season. Overall, the IRS received 48.1 million calls, telephone assistors answered 9.9 million calls (21%), and the average time taxpayers spent waiting on hold was 14 minutes, as compared with 50.2 million calls received, 12.4 million calls answered by telephone assistors (25%), and an average wait time of eight minutes during the 2025 filing season.
Historically, the IRS has measured its telephone performance based solely on calls to its Accounts Management telephone lines, and it has used a “level of service” measure that excludes calls to other telephone lines, calls routed for automated responses, and calls in which the taxpayer hangs up before being placed in a calling queue. This year, the IRS provided a 73% LOS on the Accounts Management lines and wait times on those lines averaged eight minutes.
But two of the three highest-volume telephone lines don’t fall under the Accounts Management umbrella, and taxpayers calling those lines encountered considerable difficulty getting help, according to the report. About 3.4 million calls were received on the Installment Agreement/Balance Due line, which taxpayers call when they can’t fully pay their tax liabilities and want to set up installment agreements or make other payment arrangements. The IRS only answered 31% of those calls, and taxpayers waited an average of 45 minutes for a telephone assistor to answer.
In addition, about 2.4 million calls were received on the Taxpayer Protection Program line, which taxpayers call when their returns are suspended during processing due to suspected identity theft and they need to authenticate their identities to secure the release of their refunds. The IRS only answered 19% of these calls, and taxpayers waited an average of 20 minutes to get through.
The table below shows IRS performance on the 10 telephone lines that received the highest call volumes.
Figure 2: Metrics for the 10 Most Frequently Called Telephone Lines, Filing Season 2026 Through April 18, 2026
| Phone Line | Calls Received | Number of Calls Answered by a CSR | Percentage of Calls Answered by a CSR | Time on Hold (Minutes) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Installment Agreement/Balance Due | 3.4 mil | 1.1 mil | 31% | 45 |
| Individual Income Tax Services | 2.7 mil | 1.8 mil | 67% | 8 |
| Taxpayer Protection Program | 2.4 mil | 459,000 | 19% | 20 |
| Business & Specialty Tax Services | 2.1 mil | 1.1 mil | 51% | 13 |
| Wage and Investment Identity Theft | 1.4 mil | 573,000 | 41% | 9 |
| Taxpayer Assistance Center Appointments | 1.2 mil | 718,000 | 61% | 6 |
| Automated Collection System | 1.2 mil | 642,000 | 55% | 19 |
| Practitioner Priority Service | 1.0 mil | 744,000 | 72% | 8 |
| Forms Order | 677,000 | 348,000 | 51% | 22 |
| Tax Law | 598,000 | 469,000 | 78% | 4 |
The report points out that employees in the Accounts Management function perform two key roles:
- They answer telephone calls, and
- They process taxpayer correspondence and work paper-inventory cases.
In previous years, the IRS established high LOS targets, which meant heavily staffing the phones, leading to over a million hours of annual “idle time” where employees were simply waiting for the phone to ring, resulting in backlogs of paper inventories. To allocate more resources to paper processing, Collins and others have recommended the IRS modestly reduce the LOS targets on its Accounts Management lines. The IRS did so, and the report says that decision “produced benefits for many taxpayers whose correspondence and account issues might otherwise have remained unresolved for extended periods.”
The impact of the decision on the Accounts Management telephone lines was modest; the lowest-performing telephone lines weren’t Accounts Management lines, the report says.
Difficulties obtaining refunds by paper check
During the 2026 filing season, the IRS implemented Executive Order 14247, which directs federal agencies to transition toward electronic payments to improve security, reduce fraud risks, and lower administrative costs. Overall, more taxpayers received their refunds by direct deposit this year. But some taxpayers can’t receive their refunds by direct deposit, including unbanked and underbanked taxpayers, lower-income taxpayers, certain elderly taxpayers, taxpayers residing overseas, and other taxpayers for whom electronic payment wasn’t practical or accessible. The executive order authorized the Treasury secretary “to revise procedures for granting limited exceptions where electronic payment and collection methods are not feasible,” but the report says the IRS didn’t establish clear and workable procedures for millions of affected taxpayers, creating confusion, additional work for taxpayers and the IRS alike, and refund delays of six weeks or more.
As of April 27, the IRS had issued about 4 million notices for returns that either didn’t include valid direct deposit information or contained incorrect information. The notices instructed taxpayers to log onto their online accounts to provide or correct their direct deposit information, or to request a waiver to receive a paper check. However, most taxpayers don’t have online accounts, and some couldn’t establish them. Even for taxpayers who did have online accounts, the notice omitted critical information that taxpayers needed to make a waiver request. Alternatively, the IRS allowed taxpayers to call the IRS’s 1040 telephone line to request a waiver, but it didn’t mention that option in its notice, the report says.
Delays of about 20 months to resolve identity theft victim assistance cases
For the past three years, the Taxpayer Advocate Service has reported on “unconscionable” IRS delays in resolving identity theft cases, which often require taxpayers to wait nearly two years to receive their refunds. At the end of the 2026 filing season, more than 500,000 cases were pending in inventory.
“For many low- and middle-income taxpayers, waiting nearly two years for a refund is not merely an inconvenience—it can mean falling behind on rent, utilities, transportation costs, and other basic living expenses. For all taxpayers, this delayed process is frustrating, burdensome, difficult to navigate, and time-consuming,” Collins said in the report.
Lessons from the 2026 filing season
In the report’s preface, Collins says the 2026 filing season highlights a growing divide in tax administration between taxpayers whose issues can be resolved through automated systems and taxpayers whose situations need individualized assistance, manual review, or flexibility.
“That divide matters,” she said. “Taxpayers who fall outside standard processing channels are often the taxpayers who most need assistance. Some taxpayers are comfortable navigating digital tools and online accounts, but others are not, often because they are elderly, disabled, limited-English proficient, unbanked, or lacking reliable internet access. Even among taxpayers who are comfortable with technology, some problems cannot be resolved online and require a conversation with an employee. A modernized IRS can and should improve efficiency and service, but transformation should not come at the expense of accessibility, fairness, or human assistance.
“Put differently, a digital-first strategy can improve tax administration but must not become a digital-only strategy,” she continued. “As the IRS continues to transform its operations, it must preserve meaningful access to telephone assistance, in-person service, clear notices, timely correspondence, and effective case resolution functions. Taxpayers must be able to understand what is expected of them, obtain help when they need it, and trust they will be treated fairly when problems arise. Those principles are fundamental to taxpayer rights and essential to maintaining public confidence in our tax system.”
TAS advocacy objectives for FY 2027
The report identifies the Taxpayer Advocate Service’s key advocacy objectives for the upcoming fiscal year, as the law requires. The 11 objectives in the report are:
- Protect taxpayer rights to refunds if a recent U.S. Court of Federal Claims decision is affirmed on appeal in the case of Kwong v. United States, where the court held that filing and payment deadlines were suspended during the three-and-a-half-year COVID-19 disaster period and therefore that the IRS shouldn’t have assessed penalties for late tax filings and payments (for more information on this issue, see four recent National Taxpayer Advocate blogs);
- Substantially reduce delays in resolving the cases of identity theft victims;
- Reduce burden and delays for taxpayers who are unable to receive their refunds via direct deposit and require paper checks;
- Make it easier for taxpayers to comply with digital asset reporting requirements;
- Improve the clarity of math error notices and abatement procedures, as required by Public Law No. 119-39, the Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help Act, a 2025 law based on a prior National Taxpayer Advocate legislative recommendation;
- Improve the process for extending the refund statute of limitations when a taxpayer is waiting for the IRS to decide on a request for reconsideration or an appeal of an adverse audit determination;
- Improve online Tax Pro accounts to make it easier for practitioners to communicate with the IRS, and thereby reduce taxpayer burden and costs;
- Reduce refund delays and improve communication when the IRS suspends a tax return during processing, temporarily freezing delivery of the requested refund;
- Ensure tax penalties are fairly and consistently applied, taking into account that millions of penalties the IRS assesses each year are later abated upon taxpayer request;
- Improve the process by which the IRS records taxpayer power-of-attorney designations, so designated practitioners can begin to represent taxpayers before the IRS without unreasonable delays; and
- Reduce delays in the processing of tax returns filed by or on behalf of deceased taxpayers, so families may obtain closure without unreasonable delays.
“Most taxpayers are trying to comply with the law. They should not have to choose between efficiency and assistance, between modernization and accessibility, or between technology and fairness. The goal is not simply to build a more digital tax administration system. It is to build a better one, one that uses technology to make compliance easier while ensuring that every taxpayer can obtain help when they need it and be treated fairly,” Collins said. “In sum, tax administration succeeds when taxpayers can understand what is expected of them, obtain help when they need it, and have confidence they will be treated fairly. That should remain our North Star and our shared goal.”
Photo caption: National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins
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