The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported on September 21, 2026 that the IRS paid approximately $61.5 million in interest on delayed refunds in identity theft cases it closed during fiscal year 2025. From fiscal year 2023 through 2025, taxpayers in those cases waited 20 months on average for the IRS to process them. The interest is the visible price of a backlog that left victims without their money for much of two years.
Affiliate links — we may earn a commission.
The held refund in the TIGTA report. The wait leaves a victim with no case status to follow, and The IRS Refund Recovery Kit includes a refund status tracker spreadsheet and a notice decoder for the letters that do arrive.
Open the refund status tracker for a refund the IRS is holding →
What report 2026-100-050 says about the $61.5 million
The figure sits in TIGTA report 2026-100-050, titled “The Process To Resolve Identity Theft Cases Is Long, Costly, and Frustrating for Taxpayers.” The report is signed by Diana M. Tengesdal, TIGTA’s Deputy Inspector General for Audit. On page 6 it determines that, for identity theft cases closed during fiscal year 2025, the IRS paid approximately $61.5 million in interest to taxpayers on the delayed refunds.
Three details define that number. It is interest paid to taxpayers, and it is not the value of the refunds themselves. It covers cases closed by the IRS Identity Theft Victim Assistance organization during fiscal year 2025, a year that ended September 30, 2025. And it is one year of a larger total: the report puts refund interest on cases closed from fiscal year 2023 through 2025 at approximately $124.2 million.
Twenty months on average and 582 days in fiscal 2025
The report measures the wait two ways, and the two numbers are not the same thing. The 20-month figure is an average across fiscal years 2023 through 2025: “taxpayers waited 20 months on average for the IRS to process their IDT case,” in the report’s words on page 5. The 582-day figure is narrower. The report says that “as of June 2025, IDTVA management determined that it took an average of 582 calendar days to resolve IDT claims during FY 2025.”
The IRS’s own target is far shorter. The report states that the IRS aims to resolve identity theft claims within 120 calendar days of receipt, so the fiscal 2025 average ran at nearly five times the goal. In the cases TIGTA sampled, most of the time was spent waiting for a person to pick up the file: those cases averaged 533 of 655 calendar days in unassigned inventory before work began.
Nearly 316,000 open cases at the end of September 2025
The report counts the backlog at a single date. It says the IRS “still had nearly 316,000 IDT cases that needed to be resolved as of the end of September 2025,” a count that is now a year old and is not a current inventory. It also says the Identity Theft Victim Assistance organization “recently lost nearly 300 assistors,” which the audit lists among the pressures on the unit’s capacity.
TIGTA made three recommendations. According to the report, the IRS agreed with the first and the second and disagreed with the third. The report text, not a press summary, is the place to read exactly what each recommendation asks for and how the IRS answered.
The identity protection PIN is a separate request with its own window
Alongside the case, the IRS runs a prevention tool. An Identity Protection PIN, described in IRS release IR-2026-119 as a six-digit number that blocks anyone from filing with a Social Security number without it, is valid for one calendar year. The IRS page on getting an IP PIN, last reviewed August 4, 2026, says anyone with a Social Security number or an individual taxpayer identification number who can verify their identity is eligible.
The page lists three ways in: the online account, Form 15227 for filers with adjusted gross income under $84,000, or $168,000 for joint filers, and an in-person appointment at a Taxpayer Assistance Center. It also gives the window that matters now: the IP PIN is generally available to view in the online account from mid-January through mid-November. The consequence of a missing or wrong number is stated plainly: an incorrect or missing IP PIN results in the rejection of an e-filed return or a delay of a paper return until it can be verified.
A new IP PIN is generated each year, so an enrolled filer has a fresh number to retrieve before each filing season. Enrolling does not open, speed up or close an identity theft case; the case and the PIN run on separate tracks, one for the damage already done and one for the next return.
Sampled cases averaged 533 days unassigned, and 81 of 114 got no acknowledgment letter
The wait is only part of the difficulty; the silence is the other. In TIGTA’s sample of 114 identity theft cases, only 33 of them, or 29 percent, received an acknowledgment letter, which leaves 81 that did not. A victim whose refund is frozen can therefore spend most of the period in unassigned inventory with nothing in hand showing that the case exists, who owns it or whether the identity theft affidavit, Form 14039, was received.
Two clocks run at once. The open case moves on the IRS’s schedule, which the report puts at 20 months on average, while the IP PIN follows its own calendar, with the online account view closing in mid-November and a rejected e-file or a delayed paper return waiting for any filer who uses a missing or incorrect PIN. Each of the two has to be followed separately.
The official route needs no paid help: the affidavit, the IP PIN and the identity theft case are all handled directly by the IRS, and the TIGTA report is the public record of how long that route has been taking.
Personal details on broker lists sit outside the IRS case file
The TIGTA report covers a fraudulent return that has already been filed and the case the IRS opens afterward. A separate part of the problem is how much personal information sits on data-broker and people-search sites. Incogni asks those sites to remove personal information on a person’s behalf, keeps re-sending the requests and shows the status of each one in the account, and less personal data on broker lists can mean fewer scam calls, texts and emails.
Click here to see how Incogni sends removal requests to data brokers →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the interest, wait-time and inventory figures were checked against TIGTA report 2026-100-050 and the IP PIN details against the IRS page last reviewed August 4, 2026.
