Unfortunately, it has been our experience that anything mailed to the IRS within the last 18 months to two years can take an incredibly long time for them to process. We are hearing this same refrain over and over again from other CPAs.
This issue seems to be because of COVID. Most agents are working from home and only come into the office when called in. Originally, anything that was physically mailed to the IRS was stored in trailers and tracked to be processed in order of receipt.
However, with the trailers literally being moved around the country, the IRS wasn’t able to continue tracking the order of receipt, or even which documents are in which trailer. So, truly, they are only processing the documents once they open up the trailers.
We do have a practitioner telephone line that we can use for clients in certain circumstances, but unfortunately, sometimes the answer from the IRS is that we just have to wait and be patient.
