For roughly a year, Jonathan Baer watched a paper folder full of tax-related paperwork slowly grow as he chronicled his efforts to get his 2020 tax refund. The attempts included upwards of 40 phone calls to the Internal Revenue Service. Most ended without speaking to a person. The rare ones that did reach a person still didn’t shed light on the status of a refund for a tax return he had submitted in April 2021, he said. Baer typically files his taxes electronically, but had sent in a paper return that year because he had to file certain tax schedules.
This July, the “significant” sized refund for the California, Bay Area-based startup business consultant arrived. It was 15 months after he had turned in his tax return. “I was delighted to be able to put that file folder away,” he said. Just as Baer is concluding his protracted tax saga, a related one is dawning on a larger scale. Democratic lawmakers want to throw $80 billion at the IRS’s problems, but some tax experts are wonderi …