"As of Jan. 28, the tally of outstanding individual and business returns requiring what the IRS calls “manual processing” — an operation where an employee must take at least one action rather than relying on an automated system to move the case — came to 23.7 million"

 "Nearly 24 million taxpayers are still waiting for the Internal Revenue Service to process their tax returns from last year — a number far larger than previously reported by the agency — with many refunds being held up for 10 months or more.

The inventory of unprocessed returns and related correspondence was provided by the IRS’s taxpayer advocate service to the tax-writing committees in Congress. The backlog will probably further slow service in the 2022 filing season; the Treasury Department, the IRS’s parent agency, warned in January that it expected its response to be subpar this year.

The pileup of work that remains from last year, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not approved to speak publicly, comes as the tax agency struggles to hire and train new staff to clear the logjam. In response, the IRS is considering suspending tax collections and excusing some penalty enforcement.

...Adding to the challenges, a new report from the IRS inspector general this month found that the agency continues to suffer from severe hiring shortages, inefficient practices and old equipment. That includes mail processing woes, since its systems have “outdated dust collectors” that cause paper jams.

...As of Jan. 28, the tally of outstanding individual and business returns requiring what the IRS calls “manual processing” — an operation where an employee must take at least one action rather than relying on an automated system to move the case — came to 23.7 million, the taxpayer advocate data shows.

...In January, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins had reported a backlog of at least 10 million returns based on IRS data. An IRS official, meantime, said the agency counts the inventory from last year’s filing season at about 6 million paper returns for individual taxpayers. Both numbers are far higher than the unprocessed returns the IRS faced before the pandemic — in the past, the agency typically carried 1 million or fewer returns into the next tax season.

...The stockpile does not include audits lingering because of pandemic slowdowns, enforcement and collection actions, appeals of audits, notices of tax liens, penalties or other business in the pipeline, Hooper said.

Roughly 10 percent — about 17 million people — still file Form 1040, the traditional individual income tax return, on paper.

The IRS is taking at least 10 months to process paper returns filed for the 2020 tax year, and has caught up only to April 2021 for returns without errors, according to the most recent data on its website. Last year the vast majority of taxpayers — about 77 percent — received refunds.

Because returns are processed in the order in which they were received, “it does mean the 2022 filings made this year are at the end of the line,” Hooper said.

The agency has already suspended mailing some automated collection notices that are triggered when records show a taxpayer owes taxes and has not filed a tax return. Many of these letters have been sent after returns have been filed but have not been processed."

The Washington Post