Americans can start filing their income tax returns Jan. 24, but existing backlogs and longstanding operational problems at the IRS, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, are likely to make for a frustrating filing season for taxpayers and tax preparers, a Treasury Department official said Monday.

The IRS is still dealing with backups in processing returns from the past two filing seasons. While the tax collector typically has about about 1 million pieces of unopened mail, including tax returns, in its backlog when starting a new filing season, it had 6 million unprocessed individual returns as of Dec. 23, the most recent date for which data is available on the agency’s website.

More than 150 million individual income tax returns typically roll in over the course of a few months.

Tax returns for 2021 are due April 18 for most individual filers, a few days after the normal April 15 deadline due to a holiday in Washington, D.C., though extensions can be requested. This year’s start and end dates, announced by the IRS on Monday, are more in line with […]