Americans can’t file their income taxes fast enough — but they should brace for some unwelcome news in their 2020 returns
It seems like you can’t get people to file their 2020 tax returns fast enough.
People are filing their taxes at a blistering pace so far this year, underscoring how serious Americans are about getting any tax refund due or any stimulus-check money they missed last year. The IRS began accepting and processing 2020 tax returns slightly later than usual because its systems needed a breather after distributing a second round of stimulus checks in late December.
However, there is some bad news that many Americans should be prepared for when they finally get their return: The average refund so far is $2,880 — as unemployed skyrocketed in 2020 due to restrictions on businesses and shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19 — significantly less than the $3,125 average refund at roughly the same point last year.
New IRS statistics released Thursday, when put in context, show people are submitting their individual tax returns at a much greater rate than they were early into last year’s tax season. As of Feb. 19, only eight full days into the 2021 filing season, the IRS received 34.69 million individual returns, agency statistics show.
That’s 30.5% fewer returns than the 49.8 million received by Feb. 21 last year — but that was 26 days into the 2020 filing season and weeks before conformation that the coronavirus had really taken hold in the U.S. Simple math, in fact, suggests the volume of individual returns this year.
“ Simple math suggests the volume of individual returns this year. ”
When dividing the nearly 34.7 million returns so far this year by eight filing days, the result is 4.3 million returns filed per day. The 49.8 million returns filed last year, divided by 26 filing days comes to 1.91 million returns per day.
Put another way: The IRS has received approximately 21% more individual returns than the agency received last year by Feb. 7, which was 12 days into the tax season last year. Right now, Americans are facing an April 15 deadline to file and pay their taxes (June 15 in Texas), unless they get an extension to Oct. 15, which gives them more time to file their return, but not to pay.
However, they don’t yet factor in refunds that include payments for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a powerful anti-poverty tax credit geared towards low- and moderate-income working families. Refunds incorporating the EITC and the Additional Child Tax Credit will start hitting bank accounts during the first week of March, according to the IRS.
After the Internal Revenue Service started accepting tax returns on Friday, Feb. 12, the agency took in 55 million returns in the first weekend alone, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig said this week. These 55 million tax returns were not just individual tax returns. They also included business returns and a variety of other returns, IRS spokesman Anthony Burke said.
