IRS promises on-time refunds despite new security precautions

Stronger identity-theft protections have been put into place ahead of the start of the 2016 tax filing season, the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.

The IRS insisted the new measures will not slow refunds and that it expects to still be able to process 90 percent of federal refunds within 21 days.

{mosads}The agency is making the improvements after reports last year that hackers had accessed the tax returns of more than 300,000 taxpayers. They include new security requirements when taxpayers prepare their returns online. Some of the enhanced protections will be invisible to taxpayers, the IRS said.

The IRS expects that more than 150 million returns will be filed and more than 70 percent of taxpayers will get refunds this year. That percentage is in line with the percentage of taxpayers who got refunds in 2015. Last year, the IRS issued about 109 million refunds, and the average refund was nearly $2,800. 

The IRS expects that about 80 percent of tax returns will be filed electronically and that a similar percentage of refunds will be paid through direct deposit. 

The government spending bill enacted in December provided an additional $290 million for the IRS to improve taxpayer services and cybersecurity.

“Although we will have more people staffing our phone lines this year, we expect those lines to remain busy so we encourage people to visit the web first as the quickest and easiest way to get assistance,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in a news release.    

The deadline for filing tax returns will be later than the traditional April 15 this year.

The deadline will be April 18 in most states because April 15 is when Washington, D.C., will celebrate the Emancipation Day holiday. In Maine and Massachusetts, taxpayers will have until April 19 to file tax returns because those states will observe Patriot’s Day on April 18.