Tax Season Delayed & IRS Sorting 1.4 Million Letters

Citing the need for “adequate time to program and test tax processing systems,” the service announced that it expected a one- to two-week delay in the start of tax season, and that it would start accepting and processing 2013 individual tax returns no earlier than Jan. 28, 2014, and no later than February 4. Tax season had been expected to start on January 21.

The 16-day government shutdown came during the peak period for preparing IRS systems for the upcoming tax season, which involves programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 systems.

About 90 percent of IRS operations were closed during the shutdown, with some major workstreams closed entirely, and the IRS noted that it is also facing extra demands due to the need for systems to prevent refund fraud and ID theft — and that it is still dealing with a backlog of over 1.4 million pieces of correspondence that piled up during the shutdown.