The Internal Revenue Service is delaying the annual tax filing deadline for a second straight year, according to the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. No official release has yet been issued by the IRS.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-MA) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) today applauded the decision by the Internal Revenue Service to extend the federal tax-filing deadline from April 15th to May 17th.
The two chairs say the decision comes after Neal and Pascrell called on the IRS to give already-strained Americans flexibility to file their 2020 taxes.
Last year, the IRS extended the federal filing period three months to July 15th.
This change in the federal filing deadline by the IRS does not mean Mississippians will get a similar reprieve from filing their state taxes. States set their own filing deadlines and Mississippi’s is still April 15th as of this reporting.
In 2020, Mississippi did extend its filing to July 15th along with the federal deadline.
Y’all Politics has reached out to the Mississippi Department of Revenue to see if they were going to follow the lead of the IRS in extending the state deadline. No official response has been received at press time. However, sources close to DOR say not to anticipate the state to move the date, meaning the April 15th filing for state taxes would still be in place.
The IRS is currently facing a backlog and criticism for not processing tax returns and refunds in a timely manner, even from Mississippi’s delegation. U.S. Senators Roger Wicker (R), and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R), with U.S. Representatives Bennie Thompson (D), Steven Palazzo (R), Trent Kelly (R), and Michael Guest (R), sent a letter Friday to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service urging the agency to clear a large backlog of 2019 tax returns before the 2020 tax return deadline. The letter follows a surge in calls and correspondence with constituents in Mississippi who have had issues filing their 2020 taxes and receiving the refunds owed to them from 2019 and 2020.
Today, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service announced they disbursed approximately 90 million Economic Impact Payments from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. As announced last week, Economic Impact Payments are rolling out in tranches to millions of Americans in the coming weeks.
The first batch of payments were mostly sent by direct deposit, which some recipients started receiving this past weekend. As of today, all recipients of this first batch of direct deposit payments will have access to their funds.
Frank Corder
