IRS

Tax Season Opens with Refunds Up 85%

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data tableNearly two-thirds of returns have been self-prepared.

By Beth Bellor

The latest tax season is off to a roar, with refunds up 85 percent and processing up 29 percent above last year at this time.

MORE ON TAX SEASON: MORE: Marchternity: Just Say ‘No’ | Marchternity: The Solution Is Community | Why the IRS Is Still Doing Data Entry By Hand | News on IRS Is Maybe Sort of a Little Bit Good | Why We All Hate the Tax Code | How Bullish Are You This Tax Season? | Accountants’ Top Problems for Tax Season 2023 | Tax Season 2023: Better or Worse?

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As of Feb. 3, the end of the first week of collections, the IRS had received 19 million individual income tax returns, up 13.5 percent from the same week in 2022. It had processed 16.8 million returns, up 29.1 percent.
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Why the IRS Is Still Doing Data Entry By Hand

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Young businessman sleeping on the keyboard in the officeFive recommendations are offered to improve processing. Start with scanners.

Want to know the top trends and issues this year?
Join the survey. Get the answers.
Start here.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Here’s something you’d better explain to your tax clients, lest you get blamed:

MORE: News on IRS Is Maybe Sort of a Little Bit Good | Why We All Hate the Tax Code | How Bullish Are You This Tax Season? | Accountants’ Top Problems for Tax Season 2023 | Tax Season 2023: Better or Worse?
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Should the IRS Create a Free File App of Its Own?

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Three ways to fix the program.

By CPA Trendlines

Here’s something weird: The IRS offers the vast majority of taxpayers the option to use the Free File program to prepare returns.

MORE: IRS Audit Rates Are Dropping, and Big Earners Couldn’t Be Happier | Six More Ways to Fix the IRS | Is Remote the New Normal? | Accounting Pros Face Challenges in Turbulent Times | Your Tax Season Success Plan Starts Here, Now | Tax Prep Fintech Startup: April Raises $30 Million | Accountants Agree: The Top Five Ways to Fix the IRS

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It costs taxpayers nothing. Yet only three percent use it. Can it be fixed? Should it? Congress is weighing in.

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Accountants Agree: The Top Five Ways to Fix the IRS

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The United States of Frustration: Schaffer, Zulager, Toye, Devine. (Word cloud: CPA Trendlines Research)

Some suggestions: Burn it down and start over. Abolish the income tax altogether. Privatize it.

By CPA Trendlines Research

If the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer were a thermometer, it would be popping its mercury with responses to “How would you fix the IRS?”

See: IRS Tops List of Busy Season Problems

We’re getting a lot of comments, many of them scorchingly hot. Accountants and tax preparers are not happy with the government agency that their profession depends on more than any other.

MORE BUSY SEASON ’22: Survey: Big Worries for U.S. and Small Business  |  Working Harder for Every Dollar  |  For a Few: Why Busy Season 2022 Beats 2021 |  Can the R&D Tax Credit Be Used to Offset the AMT?  |  21 Reasons Tax Clients Fire Accountants  |  Unhappy about Tax Season?  |  Individual Tax Refunds Up 13%  | Shut Down the Tax Charlatans   | Eight Quick, Easy Ways to Fix IRS Filing   |  A Tax Season Worse than 2021?  |  16 Traits of the Best Tax Clients  | IRS under COVID: Heroes or Goats?

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The top five most common recommendations:
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IRS Tops List of Busy Season Problems

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Forget COVID. The underfunded, understaffed, underequipped, underappreciated, misunderstood IRS is the top problem.

By CPA Trendlines

It probably won’t surprise you that the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer identifies IRS operations as the biggest problem tax practitioners face today. In fact, we’ve never seen such widespread agreement among respondents—an astonishing 80 percent of them.

MORE in TAX: Shut Down the Tax Charlatans | Tax Pros Preparing 46 Percent of E-filings | Eight Quick, Easy Ways to Fix IRS Filing | For a Few: Why Busy Season 2022 Beats 2021 | A Tax Season Worse than 2021? | 16 Traits of the Best Tax Clients | Six Fixable Problems at the IRS | IRS under COVID: Heroes or Goats? | IRS Launches 2022 Season with “Strong Start” | Two Big (and Obvious) Ways IRS Could Work with Practitioners | Imagine a Fully Online IRS | The Real Cost of Interstate Sales Tax | IRS At Death’s Door? | Beyond Tax Prep: The Big Cha-Ching! | Crisis at the IRS | The IRS’s 10 Biggest Problems | Fear and Loathing for Tax Season ’22

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That consensus indicates that there really is a problem at the IRS. It’s underfunded, understaffed, underequipped, and, at this point, underappreciated and misunderstood.

The real problem is that the problem is creating problems. IRS staff can’t keep up with correspondence, yet the computers, even though working off an operating system that dates back to the Kennedy administration, keep churning out moot notices and undeserved penalties.

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