By Michael Johnson
cleveland.com
(TNS)
A Government Accountability Office review of the 2026 filing season found the IRS’s pending correspondence inventory fell from 7.6 million pieces at the end of the 2025 filing season to 6.8 million in 2026, an 11% reduction. The share considered late also declined from 64% to 59%.
GAO said fewer customer-service employees and the agency’s efforts to balance telephone and correspondence work contributed to about 2 million fewer calls being answered.
Staffing and technology problems also affected taxpayers who filed on paper.
Individual paper returns took an average of about 30 calendar days to process during the 2026 filing season, compared with 16 in 2025, according to GAO.
GAO found IRS systems weren’t available to handle tax-year 2025 individual paper returns during the first six weeks of 2026. IRS officials told investigators that staff losses had delayed programming updates needed to make the systems available.
Paper refund checks faced a separate problem after Executive Order 14247, issued in March 2025, directed the Treasury Department to phase out paper checks for federal payments, including tax refunds, to the extent permitted by law.
The IRS sent about 4.2 million notices by early May to taxpayers who hadn’t provided valid direct-deposit information. Those who didn’t respond within 30 days would receive a paper refund after six weeks, according to GAO.
GAO said the process delayed millions of refunds.
By early April, the average time to issue a paper refund had increased from 13 days in 2025 to 36 days in 2026.
Direct deposits didn’t experience a comparable slowdown. Nine in 10 were issued within 21 days.
Overall, the IRS processed roughly the same share of returns as it had a year earlier. But federal reviews found specific problems in areas that relied more heavily on employees. GAO tied reduced staffing to slower paper-return processing and fewer answered telephone calls, while the National Taxpayer Advocate in her recent mid-year report to Congress found longer waits and reduced access to employees for taxpayers who needed assistance resolving problems.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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