In the mid year report to Congress, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins stated that there are significant delays for victims of identify theft, which subsequent delays on their refunds.
As reported in the IR-2024-173, the average time to resolve the identify theft when up from 19 months in 2023 to 22 months in April 2024.
“… The National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2023 Annual Report to Congress highlighted that the IRS was taking about 19 months to identify the legitimate taxpayers and issue their refunds… As of April 2024, the IRS was taking more than 22 months to resolve identity theft victims’ assistance cases, plus several weeks to issue refunds, and it had approximately 500,000 unresolved cases in its inventory.”
This is a serious issue as it takes almost two years to the taxpayer to receive their refund and generates additional adverse consequences to the victim.
A potential solution is requesting the IRS Identity Protection PIN that is a code that you will have to include when you will e-file your tax return. In tax season, you will receive a letter to your address with the code or you can log in into IRS.gov to retrieve your PIN online.
Link IRS – Get An Identity Protection PIN (IP PIN)
