The Internal Revenue Service has informed lawmakers that it could take more than a year for it to recover from the five-week partial government shutdown, according to a report.
The National Taxpayer Advocate, a government watchdog office that monitors the IRS, told House staffers that it would be 12 to 18 months before the agency resumes normal operations, sources told the Washington Post.
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The IRS will return from the shutdown behind schedule for training IRS employees and to 5 million letters from taxpayers that have so far gone unanswered, the Post reported. The tax agency also needs to hire thousands of employees for the tax filing season, House aides said.
After nearly 35 days, President Trump announced Friday that a deal had been reached to reopen agencies that were shuttered. The bill passed by Congress and signed by the president funds the government until Feb. 15, giving lawmakers three weeks to reach a broader immigration deal.
Trump was pushing for any legislation ending the shutdown to include $5.7 billion for a wall along the southern border. However, the agreement to fund the government through Feb. 15 did not include any money for the wall.
Instead, the president warned Congress on Friday that if a deal cannot be reached in those three weeks, he would declare a national emergency to bypass Congress and divert funds to build the wall.
While agencies were shuttered and hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed, the Trump administration ordered 30,000 employees to return to work without pay in an effort to get ready for this tax filing season. Roughly 8,000 employees, however, claimed a hardship exemption, and another 5,700 couldn’t be reached, a House aide told the Post.
