WASHINGTON—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday urged Congress to approve $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service to help the agency reduce a huge backlog of tax returns and allow it to go after $600 billion in unpaid tax bills.
“The IRS is under siege. It is suffering from huge underinvestment,” Yellen told a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Treasury’s budget request for fiscal 2023.
Yellen said the agency was dealing with massive problems, including a “huge backlog” in working through tax returns, and lacked the personnel needed to carry out complicated audits of higher-earning taxpayers.
As of May 27, the IRS had 10.2 million unprocessed individual returns, including 8.2 million paper returns waiting to be reviewed and processed, according to IRS.gov….