Tax season opens for individual filers on Jan. 23

It’s official: The tax season kicks off for individual filers on Jan. 23, the IRS announced Thursday.

For most taxpayers, you must file your federal return and pay your balance by April 18 this year to avoid racking up penalties and interest.

“This filing season is the first to benefit the IRS and our nation’s tax system from multi-year funding in the Inflation Reduction Act,” said acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell. “With these new additional resources, taxpayers and tax professionals will see improvements in many areas of the agency this year.”

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While the IRS typically issues tax refunds in less than 21 days, the agency has warned taxpayers not to rely on receiving their 2022 federal refund on a specific date. 

The agency says some returns may require “additional review” and take longer to process if the IRS systems find an error, there’s missing information or the agency suspects identity theft or fraud.

What’s more, if you’re claiming the earned income tax credit — a tax break for low- to moderate-income workers — or an additional child tax credit, the IRS can’t issue your refund before mid-February, according to the agency.

As of Dec. 23, the agency still had 1.91 million unprocessed individual returns received in 2022, including returns for 2021 or late-filed returns from prior years. Some 1.49 million of these returns require “error correction” or “other special handling,” according to the IRS, and 414,000 are paper returns.