Internal Revenue Service Announces Start of Tax Season 2017

The IRS will begin accepting electronic tax returns on January 23rd, with more than 153 million individual tax returns expected to be filed in 2017.

There is no advantage to filing tax returns on paper in early January instead of waiting for the IRS to begin accepting e-filed returns.

Taxpayers will get a few extra days to get their tax returns to the IRS in 2017. The filing deadline to submit 2016 tax returns is Tuesday, April 18, 2017. That’s because April 15, 2017, falls on a Saturday. That would normally result in a move to the following Monday (April 17, 2017). However, Emancipation Day falls on Monday, April 17 this year. Since that’s a legal holiday in the District of Columbia, the tax filing deadline will be pushed ahead for all individual taxpayers to Tuesday, April 18, 2017.

“The opening of filing season reflects months and months of work by IRS employees,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said. “This year, we had a number of important legislative changes to program into our systems, including the EITC refund date, as well as dealing with resource limitations. Our systems require extensive programming and testing beforehand to ensure we’re ready to accept and process more than 150 million returns.”

” The IRS still anticipates issuing more than nine out of 10 refunds in less than 21 days. Taxpayers can check out Where’s My Refund? on IRS.gov or the IRS2Go phone app for projected deposit dates after February 15. The IRS says that taxpayers will not see a refund date on Where’s My Refund? or through their software packages until that time.