I’m beginning to think that tax season is never going to start “on time.”
It seems every year, the IRS has a reason why they are not able to accept returns by a pre-set date. Granted, they usually have a good reason (ie. the procrastination of our government to agree on something), but it would still be nice if we could have tax season begin sometime in January.
The IRS announced last week that the start of the 2014 tax season, which was scheduled for Jan. 21, will be delayed by one to two weeks, due to the government shutdown that occurred at the beginning of this month.
This means the IRS will start accepting and processing returns somewhere between Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. The agency said it is working to minimize the delay, and it will announce its decision as to the official start of the tax season in December.
While we can still send in a paper return any time, which very few people do anymore, the IRS won’t look at it until the season officially starts. E-filing won’t be available until then either.
This decision comes after the agency lost 16 days — or three work weeks — to the government shutdown, during which 90% of its operations were closed. Now it has to catch up on everything it was unable to do during that time. Specifically, it still has a lot of work to do on its processing systems before they are prepared for a flood of tax returns.
“The government closure came during the peak period for preparing IRS systems for the 2014 filing season,” the agency said in a statement. “Programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems is needed to handle processing of nearly 150 million tax returns.”
Obviously however, the IRS did state that April 15 is still the due date!
–Written on October 29, 2013.