An audit conducted by TIGTA has found that the IRS intentionally destroyed an estimated 30 million paper-filed tax return documents in March 2021. However, the tax collection agency says no taxpayers were negatively affected by the destruction of these documents.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) says the IRS did this because of its massive backlog of paper filed returns. According to The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) Vice President of Taxation Edward Karl, CPA, CGMA commented:
“Considering the struggles the IRS has faced in keeping up with returns’ processing the last two years, the recent TIGTA report highlighting the revelation of the IRS’s destruction of 30 million documents last year has been concerning. IRS management’s decision to destroy information return documents due to the processing backlog raised numerous questions regarding IRS’s decision making and risk assessment process. The IRS’ recent statement provided some of the answers, but American taxpayers deserve to know why this decision was made and how it might impact them. The IRS should continue to operate with transparency on this issue.
“For months, the AICPA has urged the IRS to implement specific recommendations that would help them reduce their backlog more quickly and provide relief to taxpayers, several of which are related to pandemic penalty relief. We are encouraged that the IRS statement indicated that taxpayers and payors have and will not be subject to penalties. However, the AICPA believes that the IRS should be transparent with their remediation strategy to ensure that taxpayers who attempt to be in compliance, and payors who have been compliant with the information reporting requirements do not have penalties imposed on them in the future.”
The report does not say that actual 1040 income tax forms were destroyed, but only information returns (W-2, 1099, 1098, etc.) were destroyed. Because of this, the IRS could very well now be missing documents to properly screen for return accuracy, as well as have all the materials for tax audits.
Direct link to the TIGTA report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2022reports/202240036fr.pdf