Tax refunds are arriving later this year, and the reason is not complicated. The Internal Revenue Service is processing returns with roughly 27 percent fewer employees than it had a year ago — the agency went from about 102,000 staff at the start of 2025 to about 74,000, a loss of some 28,000 full-time positions through the federal hiring freeze, DOGE-initiated reductions in force, and an early-retirement wave that cleared out much of the experienced middle of the agency's workforce. [1] The filing season that closed Tuesday handled approximately the same volume of individual returns as last year. It handled them with substantially fewer people, and the refund check is where the shrinkage shows up for taxpayers.

The data tracks the staffing. Through April 11 — the last week of filing-season statistics IRS published before the deadline — the agency had issued 72.3 million refunds, down 1.8 percent from the comparable week in 2025. Average refund size, at $3,116, was slightly higher year-over-year, which disguises part of the picture: fewer refunds going out, slightly larger checks, net dollars flowing to taxpayers down roughly three percent in real terms. [1] Processing time for paper returns, which still account for 7 percent of filings, has stretched from the nine-week norm to fourteen weeks in the IRS's own Where's My Refund projections. [2]

Electronic filers feel the slowdown differently. The automated pipeline that processes simple returns — one W-2, standard deduction, refund direct-deposited — remains close to its usual 21-day benchmark. Returns that require human review, which is to say anything with a data mismatch, a credit claim that needs verification, or an address change from the prior year, have moved from roughly three weeks of additional review to roughly five. [1] [2] The human bottleneck is where the cuts land.

The specific notice taxpayers are receiving in disproportionate numbers this year is the CP05, a form letter explaining that a return is under review and asking the taxpayer to do nothing for 60 days. Cleveland.com covered the CP05 in a useful explainer this week. [3] What the explainer stops short of saying is that CP05 notices are, functionally, a way of converting missing staff hours into a patience tax paid by filers. The return is not suspicious. The agency does not have an examiner available to look at it within the normal window, so it sends a notice that buys time.

ITIN filers are seeing the sharpest slowdown. Individual Taxpayer Identification Number processing, already a manual workflow that predates most of the e-filing infrastructure, has been a casualty of the staffing cuts at a disproportionate rate; the National Taxpayer Advocate's midyear report flagged ITIN processing as a 2026 systemic issue. [1] The filers most affected are non-citizens with tax obligations — primarily workers who pay into the system without the political standing to lobby for service levels. The slowdown is therefore both real and quiet.

None of this is ambiguous at the policy level. The Trump administration announced the workforce reductions as part of a broader efficiency campaign and has publicly framed the smaller agency as better run. [1] The claim was testable. The test results are the refund-processing statistics. A 27 percent headcount cut has produced a 5.5 percent overall processing slowdown and, more importantly, a bifurcated experience in which the simplest returns move through normally and everything else slows by a quarter to a third. The distribution of the pain is not random. It falls on returns with complexity, which correlate with lower-income filers claiming refundable credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit.

What to do about it, practically, is limited. Filers waiting on refunds should expect the status to update slowly on Where's My Refund and should not call the agency unless the return has been filed more than 21 days electronically or six weeks by paper. The IRS call-center pickup rate is running at 34 percent this year, down from 68 percent in 2025, and wait times for the calls that do connect average forty-three minutes. [2] Filers who received a CP05 should do exactly what the notice says, which is nothing. Filers who need a refund faster than the IRS can produce one can consider a refund-advance loan from a tax-preparation chain, at interest rates that function as the private-sector version of a patience tax on a household that could not afford the public-sector one.

The larger question the filing season has asked and answered is whether a federal agency can absorb a quarter of its workforce without service consequences visible to ordinary citizens. It cannot. The consequence is the refund that arrives later, the call that goes unanswered, the notice that explains a delay the agency itself did not exist to produce last year. The budget choice is the headline story. The refund is where the headline becomes a check.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York