IRS Delays Start of Tax Filing Season Until Feb 12 | The State
The agency is still processing about 7 million returns filed last year.
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Joe Raedle / Getty Images
He Internal rents service (IRS) has delayed the 2020 tax filing season through February 12, which according to a statement prepared by the federal agency, will be on that date when the IRS will begin to accept and process last year’s tax returns.
On a regular basis the IRS tax season begins between mid-to-late January, however, this year the agency will need more time to prepare after the passage of the coronavirus relief law that took effect in late December. The deadline to file a return will continue to be April 15. According to the statement posted on the website, the IRS decided to delay the February 12 date “to avoid further delays.”
“These changes ensure that eligible individuals will receive their remaining stimulus check money as a recovery refund credit at the time they submit their statement, “the agency said in a statement.
The recovery refund credit is a new modality in the federal tax return for taxpayers who did not receive the full amount to which they are entitled in their stimulus check.
The first group of taxpayers who can claim the tax credits will have to wait until the first week of March to get your refund. The IRS assured that this would be the case if the filing season opened in late January.
The agency expects filers who claim additional earned income and child tax credits, will collect your returns in the first week of March assuming they will file their return electronically and have no problems with it.
Sign of a possible delay
It is likely that if you have not received the second stimulus check next week in the form of a paper check or prepaid debit card you could register an additional delay.
The IRS recommends that taxpayers file their tax return electronically and use the option direct deposit.
During the past year IRS fraud filters captured 5.2 million returns that claimed a refund, according to the report of the Taxpayer Defense Service, an IRS control body. For a quarter of these statements that were verified on your income refunds took more than 56 days.
2 out of 10 returns that were verified had delays of more than 120 days. The average response time for a refund is 21 days if the tax return has a problem.
Businesses distribute Form W-2 to their employees in January. The document specifies the amount of money a worker has earned and the amount of income and payroll taxes paid in the year.
Taxpayers who file their returns on paper risk delays. The IRS suffered delays during 2020 that were sent on paper due to the coronavirus pandemic and returns have taken longer to process.
As of December 24, there were 7.1 million unprocessed individual returns which represents more than 40 percent of the declarations and close to 2.3 million company declarations processed as reported by the Taxpayer Defense Service.
Related: Brace yourself: IRS delays in paying the stimulus check and tax refund will continue into 2021, a report says.
In the report that the agency presents each year to Congress, it states that the IRS had a 20 percent reduction in its budget since 2010, which has resulted in having a outdated technology and inadequate staffing levels because a large number of them have reached retirement age. In the past decade the IRS workforce has shrunk by 20 percent, without counting the problems that the coronavirus crisis caused in the operation of the agency.
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