From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Title: Testimony: IRS Backlog and Tax Filing Season Description: On February 17, 2022, GAO's Jessica Lucas-Judy testified before the U.S. Senate about the rise in IRS's workload, and a backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns. Related GAO Works: GAO-22-105802 Tax Filing: Preliminary Observations on IRS's Efforts to Address Persistent Challenges GAO-22-104938 Tax Filing: 2021 Performance Underscores Need for IRS to Address Persistent Challenges [ Ron Wyden, Chairman, U.S. Senate Committee on Finance : ] Once again, it is income tax filing season in America. There is a huge backlog of returns to work through. [ Jessica Lucas-Judy, Director of Strategic Issues, Government Accountability Office : ] As of the end of 2021, IRS had about 10.5 million returns from that year that had not been fully processed. [ James Lankford, Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Finance : ] The IRS has answered more calls than ever, but only 11% of the calls that actually were inbound were actually answered by an IRS customer service rep. [ Jessica Lucas-Judy : ] There was a lot of confusion on the part of taxpayers that prompted calls to IRS. The backlog also was a big contributor to that. People were wondering, you know, they weren't getting enough information from IRS's Where's My Refund application? We've made a number of recommendations and worked with IRS on getting more information on its website, getting information into Where's My Refund? And also, we have a recommendation open to IRS to just put a plan out there, a strategy for managing the backlog that it still has from 2020. [ End ] For more info, see our report GAO-22-105802 at: GAO.gov