It is possible they are still in the system because of the pandemic. Full paids are one of the last things to get to because, well, they are full paids. Refund stuff and prior years need to get out first due to some legal requirements. If you haven’t received any kind of notice for more info you are probably fine, but that’s not guaranteed. If you are worried a call may be best.
Hmm, ok , well I wonder what day is best to call, I am thinking not on a Monday for sure. :)
When you say “on time” do you mean April or July 15th? April should be done. July maybe not. We (I work for the IRS) are so far behind I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave another extension for this year.
Actually it was March! :)
Heh, after my fun phone call today, we are all doomed.
Sigh. 2 years in a row my paperwork has been lost.
This will sound flippant, it is not. It’s as easy as googling, “tax cpa near me.” Get a few numbers and call them and ask specifically if they have any expertise on reporting foreign corporation income and expat tax preparation. Any decent one should. You’ll need to meet or talk with them, there will most likely be a few additional forms that will need to be filed. Don’t stress, it’s what they do and they can hep you.
Like Scuzz mentioned, insist on a CPA, not a tax assistance place.
In my experience a CPA should be able to tell you what it will cost to put your return together, and it should be slightly cheaper in following years.
Seriously WTF?
Also unacceptable, according to Collins: the agency’s phone etiquette. In 2021, the IRS received 167 million calls during filing season, and answered just 9% of them. Hold times averaged 20 minutes. This year, the IRS received 73 million calls, answered 10%, and callers had to wait, on average, 29 minutes to talk to someone.
Much of the paper backlog is due to people filing returns showing $1 as entries and then asking for the pandemic payments. Somewhere this was suggested to them as a way of getting a payment they may have missed. Then those same people later filled actual returns. The IRS also received returns from prisons with prisoners doing the same thing.
The fraud in both cases was insane as were problems with missing or invalid info on the return. The numbers of $1returns from prisoners who didn’t show an address or who used their prison number instead of an SSN was huge.
I have a daughter who works for the IRS and she is still trying to sort out messes from 2-3 years ago.
File electronically. :)
I guess that explains the delay in dealing with my dad’s 2021 return. Good thing my brothers haven’t been in a rush to settle the estate.
I’m sure the IRS gets a ton of bad returns, no doubt. The tax rules and forms though are also obscure. I used tax software but ended up going from a refund to having to pay because of one question. It asked me if I had received the third stimulus payment. I checked my bank records and as far as I could tell we only got two payments. So I said no. Turns out I guess we did get the third payment, as the IRS kicked back a letter adjusting my return based on reevaluating my taxable income, taking away the two grand knockoff the tax software had put in there. I still haven’t figure out if we actually did get a third payment, but it wasn’t worth fighting about it honestly. But the IRS letter was so unspecific and unhelpful that it almost seemed like they were trying to obfuscate things.
I retired in June 2021 from the IRS. The IRS uses ancient computers, with the stimulus payments they were forced to actually set work aside until they could figure out what to do with it. In 2020 the office where I worked was shut down for 3 months because of the pandemic ( April thru June) and when I returned there were literally a dozen semi-truck trailers full of paper tax returns waiting to be worked. We worked for the next 8 months with half a staff because of the pandemic.
People and their kids filed for the stimulus ignoring the fact that the other had filed for it. Prisoners filed for it.
Finally, the IRS is not an agency known for innovation, mainly because they are told what they are to do by Congress. Current tax law dominates everything. Between aging computers and software and the changes implemented during the pandemic by congress and the president the IRS will be behind for another year or two.
PS…The software does indicate if stimulus payments were made and how much they were.
I’m sure they do. The info they send on why your return has been adjusted though is fucking cryptic to the nth degree.
They use really crappy one size fits all letters that are very generic in what they say. They tell you the basic problem without indicating the root of the problem. The letters are sent by someone checking usually one or maybe two boxes on a two page column of info. Then another person actually prepares the letter and mails it out.
I spent my last three years handling correspondence and believe me when I say I felt really sorry for tax payers sometimes.
And believe me when I say I do sympathize; I am sure the vast majority of IRS workers are simply doing their best within a Byzantine and bloated (perhaps unavoidably so) system. I in no way wish to imply any malfeasance or ineptitude on the part of people working for the tax service. The system as a whole, though, rather deserves the dings sometimes.
Not to confuse things, but at many levels the IRS is an inept system staffed with incompetent people. But it is also decades behind when it comes to technology and information systems. Much of that is budgetary but also much of it is self imposed due to legal restrictions.
You would think but no. In fact they are understaffed and underfunded.
I’m of the opinion it isn’t just the IRS that has this issue, and I don’t think it will change unless it absolutely has to for some outside reason, like say, a hack of a major system for example.
The problem with an efficient IRS is that neither party wishes to fund it.
It may for the short term only get worse as the service center where I worked shut down last year. As did one other service center in the midwest. They were closed based on a plan from 10 years ago I think. I believe the government thought e-filing would eliminate most paper returns but there are still millions of tax payers who for various reasons must still file on paper. And there are now fewer locations designed to handle those paper returns.
Its true, I saw it on the Simpsons!
