this IRS is about 29 million returns behind. Anything paper filed is going to take a long time to even show up as processing. This is from an IRS agent, my work actually got it today. (Iwork at an accounting firm):
Several weeks ago I was working on a related case and spoke to an agent and we had a lengthy conversation about the "manual" backlog. In summary this is what I learned:
This person was working from home and only went to the office when called to do so. Even the management only went to the office about 1 day per week. This person observed what was happening as the IRS shut down for Covid reasons. Initially the records had been stored in FIFO order. But this order was lost when the records were loaded in to trucks to be moved at the beginning of the Covid evacuation. The records were not loaded in FIFO order. There was no specific order of the records being loaded. The result is that no one knows exactly what is any specific trailer. If you want a particular document, no one knows which trailer it is in. According to this person those trailers are located around the US and no one knows what exactly is in any trailer, so when a trailer is brought in for processing, they learn what is in the load to be processed. That was about it.
Based on this, my expectation is that new documents are now being recorded and will be processed after the first millions of (now random) documents have been processed. It is also my speculation that the IRS does not have "document tracking" capability in its system until the document is "being processed".
This situation has caused me to modify my decision making process because I have no idea when (or if) many items will be processed.
