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This Year’s Tax Season Will Be Hell On Wheels

If you thought 2021 was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Angus Peterson
5 min readJan 13, 2022

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Old timey window stickers on the a government office advertising a place to pay your income taxes.
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

It wasn’t long ago that I wrote about the delays of the 2021 tax refunds. In that article, I mentioned that the IRS had been gutted for decades prior the pandemic, then was faced with implementing myriad new laws and emergency actions while still expected to process returns on time.

The sheer volume of changes the IRS had to deal with while simultaneously keeping their workforce safe (i.e. working from home) would have driven most of us batshit crazy. And things didn’t go great, but the agency did their best and most of us got our returns in a reasonable, if delayed, amount of time.

This year, however, is going to be a different story.

The Alarms Are Already Being Sounded

We are not even out of January, and yet the IRS is already warning us that our refunds will be delayed and other services will be limited.

How bad is it at the IRS?

Around this time, the agency has a normal backlog of 1 million unprocessed individual tax returns. That number is now 6 million, with an additional 2.3 million unprocessed amended individual tax returns.

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Angus Peterson
Angus Peterson

Written by Angus Peterson

Becoming collapse aware in the age of the permanent polycrisis. Follow to get all the new stories: https://anguspeterson.medium.com/subscribe

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