IRS’s Smooth Filing Season on Paper Hides Operational Weaknesses

For many taxpayers, April 15 feels like the finish line. For tax practitioners, it marks the beginning of cleaning up problems that the filing season left behind.

The first public readout of a filing season rarely tells the whole story.

The IRS can report how many returns it received, how many it processed, how many refunds it issued, and how many people visited IRS.gov. As of May 1, the IRS reported receiving more than 143 million individual income tax returns, processing more than 142 million, and issuing more than 97 million refunds. Those are significant operating metrics for an agency handling a massive annual workload.

But those numbers don’t capture the part of tax administration that practitioners see most clearly: what happens when something goes wrong. Filing season metrics measure throughput but not resolution.

A smooth filing season on paper can still leave taxpayers with unresolved notices, delayed refunds, confusing correspondence, authentication barriers, and limited practical access to help. Those issues often don’t show up immediately in top-line statistics.

They surface later, when a client brings in a notice that doesn’t explain the problem clearly, when an amended return seems to have disappeared into the system, or when an identity theft case keeps a refund frozen long after the taxpayer has done everything asked of them.

Practitioners see these issues early because they live in the gap between IRS measurement and taxpayer experience. Public discussion of filing season often focuses on processing totals and refund averages. That makes sense because those figures are available quickly and easy to compare year over year.

Yet the most consequential problems often are repeated friction points that turn routine representation into a months-long exercise in persistence. This filing season followed that pattern. The problem wasn’t that the IRS stopped functioning. It was that familiar operational weaknesses continued to show up.

Notices and correspondence remain one of the clearest examples. When IRS notices are unclear or disconnected from the taxpayer’s actual account history, the burden shifts to the taxpayer and their representative. A practitioner may need to reconstruct a timeline, obtain account transcripts, call multiple IRS departments, send duplicate correspondence, and explain to a client why no one can say yet whether the issue is resolved.

The National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2025 Annual Report to Congress identified several related concerns, including amended return refund delays, unclear disallowance notices, outdated paper processes, record access delays, and systemic problems with representative authorization.

Identity theft and authentication create another recurring pressure point. These cases often are discussed as fraud prevention and, of course, the IRS must protect the tax system from improper refunds. But from the taxpayer’s side, authentication can become a maze.

In its Fiscal Year 2026 Objectives Report, the National Taxpayer Advocate noted that the IRS flagged about 2.1 million returns for potential identity theft during the 2025 filing season, requiring taxpayers to authenticate their identities before refunds could be released. The report also stated that the IRS had about 387,000 identity theft victim assistance cases in queue at the end of that filing season, and that cases took an average of about 20 months to resolve.

That isn’t a minor inconvenience. For many taxpayers, a refund is rent, childcare, groceries, debt repayment, or a financial cushion that already was spent in the household budget before the return was filed. A delay measured in months, much less nearly two years, changes the real-world impact of tax administration.

Digital tools are another area where the gap between promise and practice is obvious. Online accounts, transcript access, electronic authorization, and practitioner tools should reduce phone calls and paper correspondence. In practice, they often help only up to the point where the system becomes too fragmented or unavailable to the person who actually needs to act. The Taxpayer Advocate has identified online accounts for tax professionals as lacking critical functionality needed to effectively represent taxpayers.

That doesn’t mean modernization is failing. It means modernization must be judged by whether it resolves actual taxpayer problems rather than whether a tool exists. A digital front door is useful only if it leads somewhere.

This is why practitioner feedback should be treated as operational intelligence, not post-season commentary. Tax professionals aren’t merely complaining after a difficult few months. They are identifying patterns in real time.

Tax practitioners know which notices generate confusion; when authorization tools aren’t working; which problems require repeat calls, duplicate submissions, or Taxpayer Advocate Service intervention; and which taxpayers are being harmed long before the issue becomes visible in formal reporting.

The IRS shouldn’t have to wait months for retrospective reports to understand where the system is breaking down. Filing season review should include practitioner feedback early. That feedback should inform notice design, phone routing, identity theft procedures, digital account functionality, transcript access, and correspondence processing.

The filing deadline may be over, but the performance test isn’t. The real measure of the system is whether taxpayers can resolve problems without unreasonable delay, confusion, or professional intervention that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Misty Erickson is a tax content manager for the National Association of Tax Professionals. She has worked in the tax profession for more than 20 years.

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