Filing a tax return this year took most households a few weeks between submission and refund. For anyone flagged as a possible identity theft victim, the timeline stretched toward two years instead. The National Taxpayer Advocate’s mid-year report to Congress, released in June, put a hard number on that wait for the first time in a formal objectives document: about 20 months to close an identity theft victim assistance case, with the refund held for the entire stretch. The figure lands in a report that otherwise describes a smoothly run filing season, which is part of what makes it stand out.
A Third Straight Year of “Unconscionable” Delays, in the Advocate’s Own Words
National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins used blunter language than most federal reports allow. Her Fiscal Year 2027 Objectives Report, delivered to Congress on June 24, 2026, states that victims of identity theft “continued to face unacceptable delays that, in many cases, stretched close to two years” during the 2026 filing season. It is the third consecutive year the Taxpayer Advocate Service has flagged the same backlog as “unconscionable,” a description the office now applies routinely enough that it reads as a standing verdict rather than a one-time complaint.
The number is not an estimate pulled from advocacy testimony — it comes from the Taxpayer Advocate Service’s own account of the 2026 filing season, released alongside the office’s priorities for the fiscal year ahead. The report credits the IRS with a largely successful season overall: about 139 million individual returns processed, roughly 90 million refunds issued, and expanded use of online accounts and refund-tracking tools. Identity theft cases are one of the specific exceptions the Advocate carved out from that success story.
Identity theft victim assistance cases begin when the IRS flags a return as a possible fraud attempt and freezes any refund until the real taxpayer’s identity is confirmed. Untangling that confirmation from a fraudulent filing, then releasing the legitimate return back into normal processing, is the work that now averages close to 20 months per case — time during which the legitimate filer has no access to money the return itself says is owed to them. A return filed in early 2025, in other words, could still be an open case as this year’s filing season wound down.
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More Than 500,000 Identity Theft Cases Were Still Open When the Season Ended
By the report’s own count, more than half a million identity theft cases remained in inventory at the close of the 2026 filing season — not a snapshot of a single bad month, but the backlog left standing after the agency’s busiest stretch of the year. Each of those cases represents a taxpayer waiting on a return the IRS has not finished processing, months or sometimes years after it was originally filed, while the case sits in a queue with no published timeline for any individual filer.
The Advocate’s report frames the burden in blunt financial terms: for many low- and middle-income filers, a stalled refund of this length is not merely an inconvenience but a genuine financial hardship, arriving long after the bills it was meant to cover. The report does not treat the backlog as an edge case. The half-million figure sits alongside a filing season the same document otherwise calls largely successful, underscoring that the identity theft delay is a structural problem the agency has carried for years rather than a one-season fluke.
TAS has now raised the same complaint in three consecutive reports to Congress, a pattern the Advocate’s office points to directly rather than treating each year’s number as an isolated data point. That repetition is itself part of the argument for listing the delay among the office’s stated priorities for the year ahead.
The Phone Line Built to Clear These Cases Answered Fewer Than One in Five Calls
Taxpayers whose returns are frozen for suspected identity theft are directed to a specific number: the Taxpayer Protection Program line, where a filer authenticates their identity so the IRS can release a held refund. During the 2026 filing season, that line received about 2.4 million calls. IRS assistors answered 19% of them, and callers who got through waited an average of 20 minutes on hold.
That call is often the fastest route out of the identity theft backlog — a completed authentication can unlock a refund without waiting for the full case cycle to run its course. A line answering roughly one call in five narrows that shortcut considerably, leaving many filers with no quicker path than the case queue itself. For someone who has already waited months, a call that goes unanswered is not a minor inconvenience — it is one of the only tools available for moving a stalled case forward.
TAS’s Fiscal Year 2027 Goal: “Substantially Reduce” the Delay, Not Just Document It
Among the eleven advocacy objectives Collins set for the fiscal year beginning in October 2026, reducing identity theft case delays ranks second on the list, just behind a pending court fight over COVID-era filing deadlines. The report commits the Taxpayer Advocate Service to work toward substantially shortening the resolution timeline, rather than simply logging the same complaint again in next year’s report.
The stakes for closing that gap grow along with the size of the refunds themselves. The average refund issued through the week ending May 8, 2026 reached $3,276, up 11.5% from $2,939 a year earlier, according to the IRS’s own filing season statistics. A larger average refund makes a 20-month hold a bigger sum sitting out of reach, not a smaller one, which is part of why the Advocate’s report treats the identity theft backlog as unfinished business rather than a solved problem.
When an Identity Theft Hold Turns Into a Missing Refund
A twenty-month wait leaves plenty of time for an identity theft case to grow more complicated than the original notice ever explained. Households navigating that stretch often don’t realize a refund can be formally traced through a specific IRS process, or that a deadline governs how long the money can still be claimed at all. Main Street Dollars built a companion kit for exactly that gap.
The 13-page kit pairs a notice decoder with the refund-trace steps built around Form 3911, a refund status tracker spreadsheet, and the 3-year deadline that governs when a refund can still be claimed.
See the notice decoder and refund-trace steps in The IRS Refund Recovery Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
