Original article from The New York Times by Jim Tankersley & Michael Tackett
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will direct the Internal Revenue Service to issue tax refunds during the ongoing federal government shutdown, reversing previous policy, officials said Monday.
“Tax refunds will go out,” Russell T. Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters in an afternoon briefing.
In a late-afternoon call with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration will call back a significant number of I.R.S. employees from furlough, in order to issue refunds. Mr. Mnuchin also told Mr. Neal that the I.R.S. would open the tax filing season on time at the end of January, and that enough employees would return to work to allow the I.R.S. to answer 60 to 70 percent of phone calls seeking tax assistance.
Those employees will not be paid until the shutdown ends.
The move to issue refunds seeks to circumvent a potential political problem for the Trump administration by allowing taxpayers to claim refunds despite the protracted government shutdown, which is already dragging into Day 17.
Millions of taxpayers who typically file for refunds at the beginning of the year have been unsure when they will get their money back from the Internal Revenue Service. Under previous shutdown plans — and interpretations of federal law — the I.R.S. was prohibited from dispensing tax refunds when Congress has not approved money to fund the Treasury Department, as is the case now.
By Feb. 2 last year, the earliest point in the I.R.S.’s 2018 statistics, 18 million individual returns had been filed with the agency. The I.R.S. had issued more than 6 million refunds, totaling $12.6 billion — an average refund of $2,035. The agency issued more than $324 billion in refunds for all of 2018.
