The IRS received about 177 million returns this filing season, the most since 2021, and processed about 98 percent of them by April 15. That is the same share as last year. By the agency's own scorecard, the season worked.
Then look at the numbers for the parts a person actually touches. The average phone wait went from 3 minutes to 8. A refund paid by paper check took 36 days on average instead of 13. A paper return took 30 days to process against an internal standard of 13 working days. The IRS helped 626,000 people in person, down 16% from 745,000.
Both of those readings are true at once, and that is the finding. The machine held. The people around it not so well.
The numbers come from the Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan auditor, which published its preliminary look at the 2026 season on August 10. GAO compared IRS performance data for the season, January 26 through April 15, against the five seasons before it, and interviewed the officials who run the processing and phone units. It calls the report preliminary and says more is coming. I am reporting what GAO reports, in GAO's numbers, and holding the politics.
Figure 1: the pipeline held. Ninety-five percent of returns arrived electronically, 168 million of them, and the automated path did what it does. Refunds paid by direct deposit went out fast: 90% within 21 days. Total refunds reached $296 billion by season's end, $43 billion more than the same point last year, and the IRS issued more than 8 million more refunds than in 2025. Nothing in the report suggests an e-filed return with a bank account attached had a worse season than the year before.
Figure 2: everything with a human or a piece of paper in it slowed. GAO's own numbers, 2025 against 2026. Phone wait, 3 minutes to 8. Share of answered calls handled by automation rather than a person, 34 percent to 41. Live-answer rate, 87 percent to 73, though the IRS also lowered its target from 85 to 70 and changed the measure's name, so read that row as a chosen retreat as much as a miss. Taxpayers served in person, 745,000 to 626,000. A paper-check refund, 13 days to 36. A paper Form 941, the employer's quarterly return, 45 days to 72, against a 32-day standard. And a paper 1040 at 30 days on average, which GAO's summary calls about twice as long as last year.
GAO gives two reasons, and neither is mysterious. The first is staff. The unit that processes returns ended the season with 18% fewer people than a year earlier, 8,111 against 9,850, after about 2,900 left at the end of fiscal 2025, most through deferred resignation or early retirement. The unit that answers phones and letters ended 16% smaller, 19,437 against 23,174, after nearly 5,900 left the same way. Both units were approved to hire replacements. Both hired late, partly because the autumn shutdown pushed job announcements to December, and by early April the processing unit had filled 72% of its target and the phone unit 64%.
The second reason is systems. The system that processes paper individual returns could not handle 2025 returns for the first six weeks of the year. The scanner for paper business returns could not handle them for the entire season. The IRS routed the overflow to outside vendors, which scanned 4.2 million paper returns, an 800% increase, but its own staff processed 46% fewer individual paper returns and 80% fewer business ones.
The paper-check delay has a third cause, and it is policy rather than breakdown. A March 2025 executive order directed the IRS to stop paying refunds by paper check. In January the agency began sending a notice to filers with no bank information on file, giving them 30 days to supply an account and holding the refund for six weeks otherwise. About 4.2 million of those notices had gone out by early May. By early April the number of paper-check refunds issued had fallen more than 80%, from 2.8 million to under half a million, and the ones that did go out took nearly three times as long.
The obvious objection is that demand moved rather than service failing. Calls fell 11%, to 24.7 million. Logins to online accounts hit 155 million, the most in six years, and the refund-status tool took 346 million visits. Some of that is real substitution, and GAO says IRS officials credit the online tools for the lower call volume. But wait time and answer rate are measured per call, so fewer calls should have made them better, not worse. And the letters did not go anywhere: the unanswered correspondence pile stood at 6.8 million at season's end, with 59% of it past the agency's own lateness line. That is an improvement on last year's 7.6 million and 64%, and it is still a pile.
So the season sorted filers into two groups, and the sorting was mostly by channel. If you e-filed with direct deposit and never needed a person, your season was about as good as it has been in years. If you mailed a return, waited for a check, or had a question only a human could answer, it got measurably worse. In practice, that means the defensive moves for next season are unglamorous: file electronically, put a bank account on the return, keep your own copies of everything so a question can be settled from your records rather than from a phone queue, and treat any IRS notice's 30-day window as the real deadline it is. For a business still mailing its 941s, 72 days is the argument for stopping.
The honest caveat is that this is one season, read early. GAO plans to report again on the paper-check transition and on IRS staffing, hiring was still under way into May, and the systems that failed this year are the kind that get fixed or do not. I do not know which way next spring goes. What the 2026 data does show is that the reliable path and the fragile path have pulled apart, and a filer chooses between them before the season starts.
Sources: GAO, 2026 Filing Season: Preliminary Observations on IRS Performance, GAO-26-109074 (July 23, 2026; released Aug. 10, 2026) - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109074 (PDF: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-26-109074.pdf) · GAO, 2025 Tax Filing: Management of Agency Reforms and Workforce Planning Needed to Address Severe Risks to Future IRS Operations, GAO-26-108116 (Mar. 16, 2026) - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108116 · Internal Revenue Manual 3.30.123.6 (13 working days for paper Form 1040) and 3.30.123.7.4.2 (32 days for Form 941), as cited by GAO · Executive Order 14247, Modernizing Payments To and From America's Bank Account (Mar. 25, 2025), and IRS FS-2026-02 (Jan. 2026), as cited by GAO