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People are filing their taxes at a blistering pace so far this year, underscoring how intent Americans are on getting any tax refund due or any stimulus-check money they missed last year.
The Internal Revenue Service began accepting and processing 2020 tax returns slightly later than usual because its systems needed a breather after distributing a second round of stimulus checks in late December.
After the IRS, a Treasury Department bureau, started accepting tax returns on Friday, Feb. 12, the agency took in 55 million returns in the first weekend alone, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig told federal lawmakers on Tuesday.
“At the peak, we were receiving 335 submissions per second,” he told members of the House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee.
To be clear, these 55 million tax returns comprised not just individual tax returns. They also included business returns and a variety of other types of returns, IRS spokesman Anthony Burke said.
In the first eight days of tax-return intake, the IRS received 34.69 million individual returns, agency statistics show. That’s 30.5% fewer returns than the 49.8 million received by Feb. 21 last year. But bear in mind that was 26 days into the 2020 filing season (and still weeks before the coronavirus outbreak mushroomed into a global pandemic).
When dividing the nearly 34.7 million returns received within eight filing days this year, the result is 4.3 million returns filed per day. The 49.8 million returns filed last year, divided by 26 filing days, comes to approximately 1.91 million returns per day.
Americans are facing an April 15 deadline to file their tax returns, and as necessary pay taxes due, unless they file for an extension to Oct. 15, which gives them more time to file a return, but not to pay taxes if due.
Texans, however, now have a June 15 deadline in the wake of the winter storm.
