Millions of letters are being sent out by the IRS to notify taxpayers that they may be owed money by the government due to a miscalculation.
Apparently, mistakes were made in calculating stimulus and child tax payments.
If taxpayers don’t think they really owe that repayment, they have 60 days from receiving the notice to request abatement of a math error assessment. The IRS then must comply and follow procedures to reassess the tax.
Several months back, there were already reports on these IRS “math errors”. Millions of Americans found that they owe the Internal Revenue Service more than they thought for their 2020 taxes.
The tax agency then reportedly sent out some 11 million “math error” notifications to taxpayers, more than five times as many as they sent in 2019 and more than 14 times as many as last year.
Recommended Read: IRS: Technical Issues Delay Release of Advanced Child Tax Credit Payments
The IRS got more phone calls this filing season than in any past filing season, according to a review from Taxpayer Advocate Service.
“No one could have predicted a global pandemic or the lasting and lingering impact to taxpayers, IRS employees, and tax administration during the last 15 months. To state the obvious, this filing season has been challenging for tens of millions of taxpayers and anything but normal for the IRS and its employees.” The service said.
“The IRS endured challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic — its employees endured personal and professional challenges, which resulted in a historically high volume of unanswered telephone calls to its phone assistors and a historically low level of service. CNBC reports of the more than 167 calls the IRS fielded during the 2021 season, only about 7% of taxpayers reached an agent.”
As of Oct. 2, the IRS says 6.8 million individual returns remain unprocessed. That includes 2020 tax year filings with errors.
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