IRS Closes Thousands of Amended Returns, Reducing Huge Backlog

The IRS closed about 200,000 amended returns cases during the latest tax filing season that ended April 15, an agency official said.

The IRS hasn’t fully recovered from the backlog of amended returns from the pandemic, which at its height had millions of returns waiting to be processed. In 2025, individuals waited an average of five months, and businesses waited an average of 13 months to get refunds, according the agency’s taxpayer advocate.

“Our amended return backlog for individuals actually sits in pretty good shape,” said Ken Corbin, the agency’s chief of taxpayer services, speaking to Bloomberg Tax after a session at the Council for Electronic Revenue Communication Advancement conference in Washington Thursday. Corbin said the agency closed a “record number” of cases this filing season, without giving a specific number on the total number of cases remaining.

The IRS reassigned over 1,000 employees from the human resources and IT departments to temporarily help sift through the backlog of amended returns. The reassignment was initially for about three months but has been extended for many of these workers.

These workers finished their training and have started processing cases, Corbin said, adding they will likely remain on through the summer. Taxpayer services lost almost a quarter of its workers to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficency’s incentives to leave the government.