The leaders of Congress’s main tax-writing committee are wondering if the Internal Revenue Service will be ready to handle next tax season as it’s still processing millions of pieces of correspondence that went unopened for months during the COVID-19 pandemic.
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Richard Neal, D-Massachusetts, and Oversight Subcommittee chairman Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey, sent a letter Thursday to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig asking him to answer their concerns about the agency’s preparedness for the upcoming tax-filing season due to the ongoing backlogs.
Rathi Murthy is the Chief Technology Officer at Varo Bank, the first nationally chartered all-digital consumer bank in the United States. In this role, she leads the company's end-to-end technology strategy, overseeing the design and development of secure, scalable, and AI-powered digital banking platforms. Her leadership is instrumental in advancing Varo's mission to build inclusive, accessible, and real-time financial solutions for millions of consumers.
A seasoned technology executive, Rathi brings over 25 years of experience leading innovation and digital transformation at some of the world's most recognized technology and financial services companies. Prior to joining Varo, she served as Chief Technology Officer and President of Expedia Product & Technology at Expedia Group, where she modernized the company's global travel infrastructure, integrating AI-driven personalization, modular architecture, and advanced cloud capabilities across its family of brands.
Earlier, she held executive leadership roles at Verizon Media and Gap Inc., where she led enterprise cloud migrations, e-commerce platform evolution, and large-scale product delivery initiatives across global markets.
Rathi also served as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Enterprise Growth at American Express, where she was responsible for the technology strategy and operations of the Serve platform and a suite of prepaid products including Bluebird.
Rathi's early career includes engineering leadership roles at eBay, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and WebMD, where she consistently delivered improvements in platform stability, operational agility, and customer experience.
In addition to her executive work, Murthy is a board member at PagerDuty, Inc., a leader in digital operations management, and serves as an External Expert Advisor to the University of San Francisco's Board of Trustees Committee on Information Technology Strategy. She is also a regular speaker at industry events and leadership forums, offering thought leadership on topics such as fintech innovation, integrating AI, platform transformation, and executive technology leadership.
Guy Baker, CFP, Ph.D., is the founder of Wealth Teams Alliance in Irvine, California.
He is a member of the Forbes 250 Top Financial Security Professionals list and is author of "Maximize the RedZone," a guide for business owners, as well as "The Great Wealth Erosion," "Manage Markets, Not Stocks" and "Investment Alchemy." He received the 2019 John Newton Russell Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in insurance.
“Clearly, the current filing season has been long and challenging for the IRS due to the ongoing pandemic, and we are concerned about another filing season fast approaching,” they wrote. “As you are aware, this filing season, the tax filing deadline for individual returns was extended to July 15, and the automatic tax filing extension of October 15 only just passed. Millions of taxpayers still have not had their tax returns processed, and we continue to hear from constituents who now believe their returns are ‘missing’ and others who anxiously await needed refunds. With the current backlogs, it appears the processing of 2019 returns likely will extend into 2021.”
They pointed out that the end of the calendar year is a time when the IRS usually develops tax forms and publications, prepares and tests its information systems for changes to the tax laws, and staffs and trains taxpayer assistance and other employees for the next filing season. In addition to the typical filing season workload, they noted that the IRS has some additional responsibilities this year related to the tax provisions in the CARES Act.
That includes processing the remaining Economic Impact Payments that have yet to be distributed. On Friday, the IRS announced that it has designated Nov. 10 as National EIP Registration Day in an effort to get the remaining taxpayers who have not yet received their payments ahead of the extended Nov. 21 registration deadline.
“While we remain troubled by the backlogs and issues attendant to the current filing season overflowing into the next year, we also are worried that the next filing season will arrive without the normal IRS preparedness and the necessary pandemic contingency preparedness,” Neal and Pascrell wrote.
They asked Rettig for answers by next Thursday to their questions about whether the 2021 filing season will begin on time next year, on what date the IRS expects to open the filing season, and is the IRS prepared for it.
