One IRS telephone line exists for a single job. When a return is frozen because the agency suspects someone else filed it, the Taxpayer Protection Program line is where the real taxpayer calls to prove identity and get the held refund released. It is not a general help line. For the households routed to it, it is the only switch that turns the money back on.
During the 2026 filing season that line took about 2.4 million calls. The IRS answered 19 percent of them, and the people who did get through waited an average of 20 minutes. Those figures come from the National Taxpayer Advocate, the independent watchdog inside the IRS, in her Fiscal Year 2027 Objectives Report to Congress.
A 19% answer rate on the line that releases a frozen refund
The report released on June 24 by National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins puts the Taxpayer Protection Program among the highest-volume phone lines at the agency, and among the worst performing. Its description of the line is precise about what is at stake: taxpayers call it when their returns are suspended during processing due to suspected identity theft and they need to authenticate their identities to secure the release of their refunds.
The gap between that line and the rest of the agency is the part households should notice. The IRS reported a 73 percent level of service on its Accounts Management telephone lines this filing season, with average waits of about 8 minutes. But the Taxpayer Protection Program line is not an Accounts Management line, so its performance sits outside the number the agency has historically used to describe how well it answers the phone. The report is explicit that the lowest performing lines were not Accounts Management lines.
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About 20 months to resolve a case, and half a million still pending
Answering the phone is only the entry point. Once a case becomes an identity theft victim assistance case, the report says resolution continues to take about 20 months, and that the delays often require taxpayers to wait nearly two years to receive their refunds. At the end of the filing season, more than half a million of those cases were pending in inventory.
This is not a new finding, which is the uncomfortable part. The Advocate notes that her office has reported on these delays for three consecutive years and has used the word unconscionable to describe them. The report’s own framing of the consequence is plain: for many low- and middle-income taxpayers, waiting nearly two years for a refund is not merely an inconvenience, and for all taxpayers the delay is frustrating, burdensome, difficult to navigate and time-consuming.
What a two-year hold does to an ordinary household budget
A federal refund is, for a large share of households, the single biggest cash event of the year. It is money already withheld from paychecks or paid in estimated installments, and household budgets treat it as scheduled income. A suspended return does not mean the refund has been denied. It means the money exists, is owed, and is unreachable until an identity question is settled.
The Advocate’s summary of the season states that victims of identity theft continued to face unacceptable delays that in many cases stretched close to two years. For a retiree on a fixed monthly income, a two-year hold does not shift a purchase to next month. It usually means the money reappears in a year when a different bill is due, and the gap gets covered with a credit card, a hardship withdrawal or nothing at all.
Verifying online instead of waiting on the phone
There is an alternative to the 20-minute hold, and it is narrower than it sounds. The IRS runs an online return verification service, but it works only for people who received a CP5071 series notice or letter 5447C. Using it requires the notice itself plus the original or amended Form 1040 series return for the year named on the letter, and it requires signing in to an IRS account, which for new users means creating one with a government-issued photo ID.
Two details on that page matter for expectations. Someone who did not file the return at all can say so through the same service, which is how a genuine victim reports the fraudulent filing. And verification does not release money quickly: the IRS tells people to wait two to three weeks before checking refund status, and says it may take up to nine weeks to process the return afterward. The agency also states that a taxpayer who verifies this way does not need to file Form 14039, the Identity Theft Affidavit, unless specifically told to.
The prevention step is an IP PIN, obtained before filing
Nothing in the process above is fast, which is why the IRS points to prevention on the same page. An identity protection PIN is a code tied to a taxpayer’s Social Security number or individual taxpayer identification number that blocks someone else from filing a return under it. It is the difference between stopping a fraudulent return at the door and spending 20 months proving one is the real filer.
Whether the underlying delays shorten is now a stated priority rather than a promise. Of the 11 advocacy objectives the Taxpayer Advocate Service set for fiscal 2027, the second on the list is to substantially reduce delays in resolving the cases of identity theft victims, and a separate objective addresses reducing refund delays and improving communication when the IRS suspends a return during processing. Those objectives are published commitments from the Advocate’s office, and the report to Congress is where their progress gets measured.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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