The National Taxpayer Advocate's Office stated that during the past tax filing season, the IRS had a backlog of 35 million individual and business tax returns that required some type of manual processing. (National Taxpayer Advocate, Annual Report to Congress 2021)

This backlog includes 15.8 million returns that have been ‘suspended' during processing that require further review and about 16.8 million returns waiting to be processed and about 2.7 million amended returns to be processed.

This backlog of returns includes a large number of tax returns that were sent to the IRS and there is a discrepancy with the recovery rebate credit that was claimed on the tax return with that of the IRS records.

According to the report reduced staffing combined with a large number of returns that require manual processing has forced the IRS to ‘suspend' tax returns. This means they are being set aside until the IRS staff is able to work on the tax return.

So for taxpayers who have not received their refunds and can not get further information from the IRS in regards to the status, you will just have to be patience.