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Is Your Tax Refund Late? Here’s Why.
COVID is only part of the story.
There has been an increasing chorus on both online forums and media outlets, describing the delays of our 2020 tax refunds. Even electronic tax returns are behind.
Initially, I thought that maybe the IRS was slow to ramp up their in-office work, which processed the paper returns. And that’s partly the case.
Also part of the reason is that they had to deal with last-minute tax law changes, which we’ll describe more below.
But the biggest reason for the delay, and the most insidious, is that the IRS has been systematically gutted, rebuilt, then gutted again, resulting in the slowest processing times in a generation.
The COVID Cause
Let’s discuss the obvious reason for delays at the start.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on our entire way of life, including how government functions.Work from home only kind of works, especially when so much of your workload is submitted with ink and paper.
The COVID lockdowns hit right around tax season, which put the IRS way behind back in 2020, when it was processing 2019 tax returns.
They are still dealing with those returns in 2021, right in the middle of the next tax season.
