The Internal Revenue Service is set to launch a full-court press this month in an attempt to tackle its massive backlog of tax returns. The goal in the next 30 days is to extend the first of 5,000 job offers and add high-tech customer support tools throughout its operations, officials said. The tax collector will deploy a second “surge team” to sort through its accumulation of 24 million returns and correspondence, reassigning 700 employees at its processing centers in Utah, Missouri and Texas.
It will hire more contractors to staff phone lines and complete clerical work. In recent days, it expanded customer callback functions to 70 percent of its phone lines, a move that has already saved taxpayers 1 million hours of hold time. The moves, disclosed by a senior Treasury official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly, represent the agency’s most aggressive plan to dig out from the massive backlog, the result of lagging operations due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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