The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) made an announcement about the amount drawn on tax refunds starting in fiscal year 2023; about 4.7 billion dollars were collected from 271.5 million of the 2023 tax returns, The paid 659 million dollars in a refund, reflecting an increase of 2.7% in comparison to fiscal year 2022.
A tax refund is a refund that is made to a taxpayer for having paid any excess taxes to the federal or state government, the IRS releases millions of dollars in the issue of refunds for surpluses paid to millions of Americans every year, refunds are also issued as part of refundable tax credits, for example the premium tax credit or the child tax credit.
The Average Tax Refund You Could Get This Year Is Bigger
The Internal Revenue Service in the last press release issued on April 18 talked about several successes throughout the previous fiscal year, The Internal Revenue Service attributes that to the increase in funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of the Biden administration, which allocated 80,000 million dollars in additional funding for the government agency.
This once-in-a-generation funding opportunity provided by the IRA is “an investment in the transformation of the IRS” and an investment in our nation’s financial future, the IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in the agency’s annual Factbook introduction.
The consequences of the financing of the Internal Revenue Service began to appear in the 2023 filing season and that progress has accelerated until 2024, hiring more IRS employees and modernizing the agency’s technologies and systems to provide a better quality service to American citizens.
The IRS mentioned that the funds they received have enabled them to intensify their efforts in ensuring that individuals who have high assets but do not report their income accurately or contribute as required by law are compliant. It specifically refers to those who use complicated strategies to declare less income than what they are obligated to pay in taxes.
The IRS expressed that there was no increase in audits, for those with incomes less than $400,000 per year, audits are a study of accounts and financial information, either to a company or an individual, in order to ensure that the information they are contributing to the taxation is correct.
Furthermore, the IRS recently made improvements to the customer service system, among some of the improvements is the response to more than 1 million phone calls that in the 2023 tax season, as well as the increase in the number of taxpayers who are eligible to make the filing of their return for free.
The Direct File pilot plan launched this year, with filers in 12 U.S. states eligible to make and file their simple tax returns directly with the IRS completely free of charge.
“Taxpayers continued to see significant improvements from the IRS during the 2024 filing season,” Werfel said.
With the help of additional funds and resources, the IRS service for taxpayers this season left the levels that were presented in the last 10 years null, this season I represent improvements in the real world for those who seek help, either by calling, entering irs.gov or by showing up personally.