IRS Making Progress on Coronavirus-Related Backlogs

The IRS has begun to make headway sifting through backlogs caused by the coronavirus pandemic, agency officials said Wednesday.

The virus forced the agency to temporarily close offices and pause some operations, causing a lot of work and mail to pile up. At the beginning of the summer, the IRS recalled thousands of workers to start sifting through the accumulated work.

• Erin M. Collins, the leader of the Internal Revenue Service’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, said it’s her understanding that the agency is caught up with all outgoing correspondence, such as collection notices, that had been generated before the closures but weren’t mailed. Those have gone out the door, she said during an American Bar Association webcast.
• That doesn’t include the millions of pieces of incoming mail that the IRS received during the closures and is still processing, she said.
• The IRS is beginning to sort through a heap of unprocessed powers of attorney it received through the Centralized Authorization File system used by tax professionals, said Darren Guillot, deputy commissioner for collection and operations support for the IRS’s Small Business and Self-Employed Division.
• “All of our CAF locations are now open,” he said.