Hold onto your refund requests, folks: it’s going to be another late start to tax season.
Following a delayed start to the 2013 tax season – resulting in an abbreviated and (stressful!) tax season with just 75 days – the Internal Revenue Service has announced a delay of approximately one to two weeks to the start of the 2014 filing season. The reason? IRS needs more time to “allow adequate time to program and test tax processing systems following the 16-day federal government closure.”
That’s right, blame the shutdown.
The 16-day shutdown resulted in a pile-up of 400,000 pieces of correspondence – on top of the 1 million items already being processed before the shutdown. The timing of the shutdown also coincided with the filing deadline for taxpayers on an extension. October 15, 2013, remained the filing season deadline for more than 10 million taxpayers even as IRS was shutdown.
Even worse? The shutdown happened right at the height of the season for the IRS in terms of readying systems for the upcoming filing season. Programming, testing, and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems to kick off filing season in early January goes on year-round, but the bulk of the work comes in the fall of the year just before the new filing season. As IRS scrambles to catch up on missed workdays, preparing for next season has been pushed back.
The result is that taxpayers will see a delay to the start of the 2014 filing season. The original start of the 2014 filing season was expected to be January 21; it will now start sometime between January 28 and February 4 if the one to two-week estimate holds. By comparison, the 2013 season – which was supposed to start January 22 – opened on January 30, 2013. In 2012, the IRS opened tax season on January 6, 2012, and accepted e-filed returns as early as January 17, 2012.
Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel says that IRS is trying to accelerate operations in order to open as early as possible. However, if those original projections hold, the opening date could be pushed well into February, making for an extraordinarily short tax season. The due date for timely filed individual income tax returns remains April 15, 2014.
A firm start date for the 2014 tax season won’t be announced until December.
