After the IRS shut down in March because of the pandemic, mail started piling up. Bags of it. Truckloads of it. Millions of pieces of correspondence, including many, many, many tax returns filed on paper. Although many IRS employees have returned to work, the sheer volume of mail is causing unprecedented delays. Two months ago, the IRS was plowing through 5 million tax returns. Since then, the extended tax deadline of July 15 has come and gone, and many more returns have been added to the backlog. How many returns is 5 million? Assuming an energetic employee could process a return in 5 minutes (an utterly unrealistic assumption) and did not need to stop for such luxuries as food, sleep, or Red Bull, that employee could plow through 5 million returns in a little less than 48 years. Fortunately, the IRS has more than one employee, but you get the idea that it's going to take some time to make it to the bottom of the pile. (It's unclear how many pieces of other correspondence ...
