UPDATE: I found out why the IRS rejected my I-Bond. By the way the "tax advocate" was useless. They were assigned my case in November and I had one phone call with them. The advocate was supposed to get back to me no later than February 3 and never did. Anyway I had to find out myself the reason the I-Bond was rejected. The IRS MADE AN ERROR transferring the data from Form 8888 to their format. I filed a manual return. On my form 8888 the total was $5,000. The IRS added $5,000 in the direct deposit block (I had ZERO for direct deposit.) This was an obvious blatant error on the IRS that changed Form 8888 total from $5,000 to $10,000. Now, due to the IRS error, the total did not match form 1040.
As it was impossible to communicate with the "tax advocate", numerous emails and phone calls are never returned. I did mail both the tax advocate and the IRS "accounts mgmt" where the error occurred. Got no response from that either.
After numerous phone calls I was told by the IRS that "we are sorry, there is nothing we can do." They just cut another check and mailed it to me instead of making it right and sending an I-Bond which they should have initially done in October 2021. To add insult to injury, the 9 months they held onto my "voided check" that the IRS told me to return, they added ZERO interest. On top of that the paltry interest I got initially for the IRS taking 8 months to process my original return, they said it was taxable.
Now if the table was turned and I made a mistake and owed the IRS money they would be all over it slapping on late fees and high interest charges etc. It's also funny it takes just one day for them to process your electronic payment but it takes months for the IRS to process a refund.
If you are getting a refund I would encourage you to E-File. If you do a manual return it may take months for you to get your return processed and your refund back. They are still blaming Covid for the backlog. I'm still shocked how they can get away with it as I lost hundreds of dollars in I-Bond interest due to their failure to process the I-Bond back in October 2021.
