The last 24 months has been an extreme challenge for our restaurant clients.

It has also been a challenge for the IRS.

With a slurry of new laws to stimulate the economy and fight Covid, Congress has put the burden of administrating it all largely on the IRS.

The IRS has had to institute procedures for obtaining, responding to and auditing stimulus payments in two separate years, monitoring state unemployment payments, making rules for PPP and PPP forgiveness, RRF, grants, new carryback rules and the Employer Retention Credit (ERC) refunds.  This is major stuff and this is all on a reduced budget.

It’s a mess.

As of the beginning of April 2022, the IRS had a backlog of 35 million individual and business tax filings and 2.3 million unprocessed ERC refunds.

It may take years to get back up to speed.