The Internal Revenue Service will open the 2014 filing season on January 31, 10 days later than originally planned. The delay is due to the federal government’s partial shutdown for 16 days in October, which caused significant delays in the annual process for updating IRS Systems.

The 2014 start date is one day later than the 2013 filing season opening, one of the shortest tax season in recent years. That delay was due to law changes made by Congress on January 1 under the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA). The extensive set of ATRA tax changes affected many 2012 tax returns.

Despite the late start this year, the April 15 tax deadline, which is set by statute, remains in place. Taxpayers have the option of requesting an automatic six-month extension to file their tax return. The IRS has indicated that it will not process any tax returns before January 31.

According to the IRS, its systems, applications and databases must be updated annually to reflect tax law updates, business process changes and programming updates in time for the start of the filing season.

The October closure came during the peak period for preparing IRS systems for the 2014 filing season. Programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems is needed to handle processing of nearly 150 million tax returns. Updating these core systems is a complex, year-round process with the majority of the work beginning in the fall of each year.

The IRS says that about 90 percent of its operations were closed during the shutdown, with some major work streams closed entirely during this period, putting the IRS nearly three weeks behind its tight timetable for being ready to start the 2014 filing season. There are additional training, programming and testing demands on IRS systems this year in order to provide additional refund fraud and identity theft detection and prevention.

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