By Michael Johnson
cleveland.com
(TNS)
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The IRS processed nearly 99% of individual income tax returns it received during the 2026 filing season and issued more refunds than a year earlier, even after losing more than a quarter of its workforce.
But taxpayers whose returns needed extra processing or help from an employee often had a different experience. The national findings help explain how a Brunswick, OH, couple could wait five months for an $8,000 refund even though most returns moved through the system normally.
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These are five takeaways from the original article, which examined where IRS service held up and where staffing losses were most visible.
1. Most returns still moved through the system normally
The IRS received about 140.2 million individual returns through April 17 and processed about 138.6 million. About 98% were filed electronically.
The agency issued about 90.4 million refunds, 5.1% more than at the comparable point in 2025. Most electronically filed returns continued to move through automated processing without major delays.
2. A suspended return did not necessarily mean a long-delayed refund
About 14.17 million individual returns were suspended somewhere in processing, including returns routed for error resolution, identity-theft review, suspected fraud or other account problems.
But only about 1.1 million taxpayers received refunds outside normal IRS processing times. Those taxpayers waited an average of about 5.5 weeks. The IRS generally considers three weeks normal for electronically filed returns and six weeks for paper returns.
3. Taxpayers who needed an employee had a harder time getting help
The IRS workforce fell 27%, from 102,101 employees in January 2025 to 74,465 by December. Taxpayer Services staffing declined 21%.
During the 2026 filing season, employees answered 9.9 million of 48.1 million calls, or 21%. A year earlier, they answered 25%. Average hold time increased from eight minutes to 14 minutes.
The Taxpayer Protection Program, which handles suspected identity theft and related return holds, answered about 19% of roughly 2.4 million calls. Average hold time was 20 minutes.
4. Paper filers and paper-check recipients faced longer delays
Individual paper returns took an average of about 30 days to process, up from 16 days in 2025. Federal investigators found IRS systems were unavailable for tax-year 2025 paper returns during the first six weeks of 2026 after staff losses delayed programming updates.
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Paper refund checks also slowed. By early April, the average time to issue one had increased from 13 days in 2025 to 36 days in 2026. Direct deposits did not show a comparable slowdown; nine in 10 were issued within 21 days.
5. Moving employees between workloads produced gains and losses
The IRS shifted some employee time from telephone work to correspondence and taxpayer cases as it tried to balance workloads with fewer customer-service workers.
That helped reduce pending correspondence from 7.6 million pieces at the end of the 2025 filing season to 6.8 million in 2026, an 11% decline. The share considered late also fell.
But the tradeoff contributed to about 2 million fewer calls being answered. The clearest service problems in 2026 were concentrated where taxpayers depended on employees rather than automated processing.
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©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit cleveland.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
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