The Internal Revenue Service should increase its use of overtime and internal employee reassignments to address backlogs of tax returns and correspondence, congressional Democrats demanded on Thursday.
IRS has already implemented mandatory overtime for some workers and deployed “surge teams” to address its unprecedented backlog, but a bicameral group of lawmakers—and the union representing most IRS employees—said the agency should go further. IRS typically enters each year with about 1 million cases in its inventory, but it currently has 23.5 million. At a hearing on Thursday, members of the Senate Finance Committee called the situation a “crisis.”
