IRS Struggles to Rebuild

Washington Post: “The IRS’s unprecedented backlog last winter of 24 million returns and taxpayer correspondence for the 2020 tax year was propelled by colliding crises: the pandemic decimated its workforce atop years of budget cuts and attrition, new stimulus measures added to the workload, and the agency remained crippled by the way it does business, processing the millions of returns it still receives on paper each filing season with red pen edits, manual data entry and clunky computer software that dates to the 1960s.”

“With technology upgrades on hold for now, the men and women gathered here off Interstate 15 represented one agency’s effort to reboot after a public health crisis that has left major functions of the federal government in disarray, with uncertainty about when it will return to a pre-pandemic normal.”