New statistics from the Internal Revenue Service indicate that the average tax refund for this current tax filing season is now above the average refund issued by the tax collection agency last year.
The statistics, released Thursday, indicate that on average a taxpayer receiving a refund will get $40 more back this year than last year. Overall, the number of taxpayers receiving refunds is still down from this point last year, by close to 2 million people, though that’s at least in part because more Americans paid less in taxes due to the Republican tax overhaul law passed in 2017.
Refunds have been a political football this year. Democrats had pointed to lower refund figures across the board as an indication that the 2017 law did not live up to its promise. Republicans, meanwhile, point to the fact that most Americans had less withheld from their regular paycheck as a result of the law, meaning that refunds are down because most Americans paid less in taxes over the course of the year.
The IRS attributed the recent uptick in refund average to the fact that the remainder of money owed to households that receive two major tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credits and Child Tax Credits, were paid out this week.
The fact that the total number of returns received and processed this year remain down from the same point last year may be due to a combination of taxpayers taking their time with the major changes from the 2017 reform effort, and the partial government shutdown that disrupted IRS operations early in the year.
The tax collection agency urged people not to draw conclusions from weekly return and refund data due to the fact that it may fluctuate significantly from week-to-week.
“[W]e remind taxpayers that weekly filing season data is variable and will continue to fluctuate,” the IRS said in a release on Thursday afternoon. “We caution against drawing broad conclusions on refunds overall this early in the filing season.”
