TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration) has conducted and audit and reported that the unprocessed individual returns, as well as the additional returns and correspondence in the Error Resolution, Rejects, and Unpostables functions and the Accounts Management inventory, include returns, etc. for taxpayers who still have not received their tax year 2019 tax refunds, the audit noted.

TIGTA stressed that IRS’s ability to resolve the backlog may well be impacted by the need to divert manpower and other resources to issuing economic impact payments or an unforeseen closure of Tax Processing Centers due to the pandemic. “The ability of these taxpayers to contact the IRS to receive updated information about the status of their refunds is a further challenge as staffing issues continue to hinder the IRS’s ability to provide adequate customer service,” the audit said.

The bulk of the work done at Tax Processing Centers “is not conducive to a telework environment,” TIGTA said. As described in the audit, “this work includes the receiving, sorting, and distributing of mail and the processing of paper tax returns, which requires manually inputting information from the tax return into IRS systems, correcting errors, and corresponding with the taxpayer, if needed.”

IRS has been able to restore most of its toll-free taxpayer assistance telephone lines and reopen many of its Taxpayer Assistance enters, the audit said.