the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

CNN is like politicians. All lies when their lips are moving. Maybe some of that indicated "young people' group are starting to see the light ?
 
HALLELUJAH!! No need to explain the cultural importance of the first tuna of the New Year sold at auction in Japan since it didn't even make $200,000, one of the lowest in years...

Japan tuna goes for $145,000 as pandemic dampens New Year auction​

The price is about 20 times less than prepandemic levels.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE / January 5, 2022
AP20279358695045-1880x1254.jpg
A sushi chef holds up the head of a bluefin tuna at a restaurant in Tsukji market area in Tokyo after it was sold at the first auction of the year at the Toyosu fish market on Jan. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)


TOKYO (AFP) — The buyer of a $145,000 tuna at Tokyo's traditional New Year auction said Wednesday he hoped the purchase would "brighten" a Covid-hit 2022.

The top price paid for a tuna at the first auction of the year at Tokyo's Toyosu fish market fell for the third year running, with demand hit by the pandemic.

The 16.88 million yen shelled out jointly by a restaurant operator and a wholesaler for the huge bluefin tuna on Wednesday was far below the 2019 record of 333.6 million yen.

The first tuna auction of the year at Toyosu market is a closely watched tradition that draws a horde of fish wholesalers every year.

Bidders sometimes shell out an enormous amount to win the top-priced tuna, which is seen as bringing good luck, as well as plenty of publicity for the buyer.

Wednesday's top-priced 465-pound fish was caught off the northern Aomori region of Japan, famous for its quality tuna, and went to Michelin-starred sushi restaurant operator Onodera Group and Japanese wholesaler Yamayuki.

Hours after the early-morning auction, the prize fish was delivered to a restaurant operated by Onodera in Tokyo's upscale Omotesando neighbourhood to be publicly sliced and filleted.

"I participated in the auction hoping to get the top-priced tuna, which is considered auspicious, and serve it to our customers to brighten their year ahead a little, even as our world remains marred by the pandemic," head chef Akifumi Sakagami told AFP.

The tuna will be offered to customers both in Japan and at the firm's restaurants abroad, including in Hawaii, New York and Los Angeles, he added.

Sushi enthusiasts gathered outside the upscale Tokyo restaurant to await the tuna, eager for a morsel.
Junko Kawabata, 78, said she had jumped on the expressway from her home in eastern Tokyo for the chance to taste the top-priced catch.

"I just love tuna," she said, proudly displaying a numbered ticket indicating she would be the first customer to be served.

"I can't wait to eat a piece of it."

Another sushi lover, 59-year-old company employee Mitsuaki Tsubota, also arrived early to get a ticket.
Tsubota, whose workplace is across the street from the Onodera restaurant, said he would pop out of the office during his lunch break to enjoy the tuna.

"That would be a very luxurious lunch," he said with a grin.
 
cany said:
Oh see that fker in the water its fine see it on your porch your running like a little school girl
Click to expand...
Just sent it off to a very arachnophobic friend who I've been taunting for years. In one "caper", I stuck a large, remote control toy tarantula in his office. After he was settled in one day, out came the spider and out dashed Kevin, white faced!!

Of course the entire office crowd was outside of his office for the "reveal", ROTFLOAO!!!
 

Dozens saved from being stranded on ice floe​

SCOTT, Wis. (WKRC/CNN Newsource) - Nearly 3 dozen people were rescued from an ice sheet in Wisconsin on Saturday.

The officers of the Brown County Sheriff's Office say that 34 people were rescued near the shore of Point Comfort in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Reports say that the ice on the bay's east shore was weakened due to barge traffic from Friday.

No injuries were reported, but officials say people should not use the ice recreationally.

34 rescued after ice separates from main shore on Green Bay​

TOWN OF SCOTT (WLUK) -- It's not what Shane Nelson and Robert Verhagen expected.

"Didn't catch any fish, ran out of propane early and got stranded on the ice," said Nelson.

It was their first time ice fishing.

"It sounded like, almost, somebody fired a gun out there," said Nelson. "We thought it was interesting, got out of our shanty, took a look and people were yelling on the ice we're separating."

Late Saturday morning, a piece of ice separated from the main shore line on Green Bay, taking their gear with it.

The Brown County Sheriff's office first reported 27 people on the ice floe, then upped that number to 34 a few hours later.

No one was injured and no medical attention was needed.

Brown County Sheriff's Office, New Franken Fire, Green Bay Fire, WI DNR and the Coast Guard all responded to the incident.

Lt. John Bain with the Brown County Sheriff's Office adds he believes the ice fishermen were on the separated ice shove for an hour and a half.

"I heard reports that the ice had drifted out approximately 2,000 feet from where they originally were," said Bain. "So our ice boat operators indicated that the ice had moved farther each trip that they went back for a rescue."

Adding the rescue took multiple trips.

And it may have been caused by a passing ship.

"A barge may have come through and that may have disrupted the ice. The disruption of the ice along with natural occurring conditions may have led to that," said Bain. "The current and the winds, things can change fast, and you're not always aware that they are changing."

A reminder, the bay isn't completely frozen over.

It's why Bain says to be aware of conditions, and having your cell phone on.
 
Gee, I thought the Gates of Hell were at the western edge of LI Sound...

Turkmenistan’s leader wants to extinguish the country’s ‘Gates of hell’​

1641762411617.webp


The crater fire named “Gates of hell” is seen near Darvaza, Turkmenistan, on July 11, 2020. The president of Turkmenistan is calling for an end to one of the country's most notable but infernal sights. (Alexander Vershinin/AP)

If Turkmenistan’s president has his way, the “Gates of hell” may soon be shut.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said in televised remarks Saturday that he wants to extinguish the famous flaming natural gas crater that has burned in the Central Asian country for decades, Agence France-Presse reported.

The president raised environmental and economic concerns and asked his government to find ways to put the fire out.
The crater “negatively affects both the environment and the health of the people living nearby,” Berdymukhamedov said, according to AFP. “We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people.”

Officially called the Darvaza gas crater, the blazing pit in the middle of the Karakum desert has long been a draw for the few tourists permitted to visit Turkmenistan. About 200 feet wide by some measures and at least 70 feet deep, it cuts a dramatic image against the vast expanse of empty land surrounding it.

The crater’s formation has often been attributed to a Soviet drilling accident in 1971. Geologists supposedly lit one of the large sinkholes created by the accident on fire to try to burn off the methane there. But Turkmen geologists said the crater may have been formed in the 1960s and lit two decades later, BBC Travel reported, and its origin remains a mystery.

Berdymukhamedov also ordered experts to endeavor to extinguish the flames in 2010, to no avail.
Canadian-born scientific explorer George Kourounis became the first person to touch the bottom of the crater in 2013, wearing a heat-resistant suit. Reaching the bottom “felt like being on another planet,” Kourounis told Insider in 2020.

“The walls are lit up. Everything is glowing orange from the fire. There’s poisonous gas everywhere,” he said.
 
Here we go, they're going to keep their paws on our $$ as long as they can...

Treasury warns of ‘enormous challenges’ this tax-filing season that could delay refunds​

Officials predict a number of services could be delayed because of issues related to the pandemic and budget constraints. The tax filing deadline this year is April 18.​


Treasury Department officials on Monday said that the Internal Revenue Service will face “enormous challenges” during this year’s tax filing season, warning of delays to refunds and other taxpayer services.

In a phone call with reporters, Treasury officials predicted a “frustrating season” for taxpayers and tax preparers as a result of delays caused by the pandemic, years of budget cuts to the IRS, and the federal stimulus measures that have added to the tax agency’s workload.

Typically, IRS officials enter filing season with an unaddressed backlog of roughly 1 million returns. This year, however, the IRS will enter the filing season facing “several times” that, Treasury officials said, although they declined to give a more precise estimate. The IRS website says that as of Dec. 23, 2021, it still had 6 million unprocessed individual returns, and as of the start of this month it still had more than 2 million unprocessed amended tax returns, a separate category.

The IRS closed last filing season with more than 35 million unprocessed returns — a fourfold increase from the last year before the pandemic. As the backlog increased, the IRS also failed to respond to the enormous increase in calls for assistance. Only 9 percent of calls were answered by an IRS customer service representative, while only 3 percent were answered for the 1040 support line for individual income tax returns, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate, a watchdog group.

The pandemic forced the closure of many in-person centers where paper forms are processed, while also affecting the IRS workforce. But even before the pandemic, budget cuts to the IRS forced through by Republicans had led to a roughly 25 percent decline in the size of its staff. And these challenges were exacerbated by the federal response to covid, which required the IRS to implement big new programs — from stimulus payments to the expanded Child Tax Credit — for tens of millions of families.

“By definition, no matter how much more efficient you are, you can’t lose 25 percent of the workforce and assume you can do the same volume of work. It’s a problem across the board — information technology; revenue agents; people answering the phones,” said John Koskinen, who served as commissioner of the IRS under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“The fact the filing season has gone so well over the last three years is an amazing tribute to the capacity of the workforce, but if you keep underfunding the place it’s not a question of whether it will have a major problem — it’s a question of when.”

Treasury officials said the tax filing deadline for 2021 income is Monday, April 18. Treasury officials said there are no current plans to extend that deadline this year, urging taxpayers to file as early as possible.
Treasury officials also urged taxpayers to file their returns online and create an account at IRS.gov.

The IRS budget has been significantly cut by roughly 20 percent over the last decade across all four of its major areas of operation — including tax enforcement, taxpayer services, and agency expenses for information technology, among other operational needs.

The decline in taxpayer enforcement has spurred a wave of concern about the ballooning “tax gap,” or the discrepancy between what taxpayers owe and what the agency collects. Nonpartisan estimates put the figure in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The Biden administration has pushed to beef up the IRS’s tax collection budget, hoping to spend $80 billion more on this area, in part because collecting that additional revenue will help it pay for other priorities.

Democratic lawmakers have also pushed to bolster the agency’s funding more broadly through the congressional appropriations process in a way that would offer more taxpayer services. Currently, the IRS budget is approximately $12 billion.

The House of Representatives approved a 14 percent increase to the agency’s budget as part of its budget proposal. But that effort is tied up in the Senate, and the federal government is on track to be funded at existing levels until February. Many Republicans oppose an expansion of the IRS’s budget.

Even if the IRS budget is increased, it would likely not be in time to allow the agency to hire for this filing season. As a result, the IRS heads into its busiest time of year with a workforce that is now the same size as it was in 1970 — even though the U.S. population has grown by 60 percent since that time, according to Treasury officials.

The agency also had fewer than 15,000 people tasked with handling more than 240 million calls, which translates into roughly 16,000 calls per employee. Treasury officials also said there are fewer auditors at the IRS that at any point since World War II.

Roughly 90 percent of taxpayers file their returns electronically, but about 10 percent still mail them in on paper — the category that causes the most delays. The National Taxpayer Advocate’s report from last year points out that many taxpayers filing printed returns would prefer to do so electronically but can’t, because taxpayers are required to submit statements or other forms that the agency does not process online.

Mark Everson, who served as the IRS commissioner during the George W. Bush administration, said “practitioners across the country are very concerned” about the IRS’ ability to handle the upcoming tax season.

“The service has done a good job getting relief payments and Child Tax Credits out the door, but it has a day job of processing tax returns. The filing season is always job one,” Everson said. “They went down early and hard from the pandemic and they’ve never really fully recovered. For both taxpayers and regular practitioners, the inability to get through on the phones is very frustrating.”
 
Roccus7 said:
Gee, I thought the Gates of Hell were at the western edge of LI Sound...

Turkmenistan’s leader wants to extinguish the country’s ‘Gates of hell’​

View attachment 42913

The crater fire named “Gates of hell” is seen near Darvaza, Turkmenistan, on July 11, 2020. The president of Turkmenistan is calling for an end to one of the country's most notable but infernal sights. (Alexander Vershinin/AP)

If Turkmenistan’s president has his way, the “Gates of hell” may soon be shut.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said in televised remarks Saturday that he wants to extinguish the famous flaming natural gas crater that has burned in the Central Asian country for decades, Agence France-Presse reported.

The president raised environmental and economic concerns and asked his government to find ways to put the fire out.
The crater “negatively affects both the environment and the health of the people living nearby,” Berdymukhamedov said, according to AFP. “We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people.”

Officially called the Darvaza gas crater, the blazing pit in the middle of the Karakum desert has long been a draw for the few tourists permitted to visit Turkmenistan. About 200 feet wide by some measures and at least 70 feet deep, it cuts a dramatic image against the vast expanse of empty land surrounding it.

The crater’s formation has often been attributed to a Soviet drilling accident in 1971. Geologists supposedly lit one of the large sinkholes created by the accident on fire to try to burn off the methane there. But Turkmen geologists said the crater may have been formed in the 1960s and lit two decades later, BBC Travel reported, and its origin remains a mystery.

Berdymukhamedov also ordered experts to endeavor to extinguish the flames in 2010, to no avail.
Canadian-born scientific explorer George Kourounis became the first person to touch the bottom of the crater in 2013, wearing a heat-resistant suit. Reaching the bottom “felt like being on another planet,” Kourounis told Insider in 2020.

“The walls are lit up. Everything is glowing orange from the fire. There’s poisonous gas everywhere,” he said.
Click to expand...
Nice if they could harness that sucker somehow.
 
Very interesting. I'm sure groups like PETA will start crusades against further transplants...

U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient, a medical 1st​

pressherald.com/2022/01/10/u-s-surgeons-transplant-pig-heart-into-human-patient-a-medical-1st/

By CARLA K. JOHNSON January 10, 2022
In this photo provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, members of the surgical team show the pig heart for transplant into patient David Bennett in Baltimore on Friday. On Monday, the hospital said that he's doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery. The patient was dying and had no other options, his son said.


In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told the Associated Press.
“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant program.
But prior attempts at such transplants – or xenotransplantation – have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.

“I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant.

Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees xenotransplantation experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization, available when a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options.

Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.

The Maryland transplant takes their experiment to the next level, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led that experiment at NYU Langone Health.

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” he said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

It will be crucial to share the data gathered from this transplant before opening the option to more patients, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable,” Maschke said.

The surgery last Friday took seven hours at the Baltimore hospital.

“He realizes the magnitude of what was done and he really realizes the importance of it,” David Bennett Jr. said of his father. “He could not live, or he could last a day, or he could last a couple of days. I mean, we’re in the unknown at this point.”

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed.
 
Roccus7 said:
Very interesting. I'm sure groups like PETA will start crusades against further transplants...

U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient, a medical 1st​

pressherald.com/2022/01/10/u-s-surgeons-transplant-pig-heart-into-human-patient-a-medical-1st/

By CARLA K. JOHNSON January 10, 2022
In this photo provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, members of the surgical team show the pig heart for transplant into patient David Bennett in Baltimore on Friday. On Monday, the hospital said that he's doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery. The patient was dying and had no other options, his son said.'s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery. The patient was dying and had no other options, his son said.


In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center say the transplant showed that a heart from a genetically modified animal can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

The patient, David Bennett, 57, knew there was no guarantee the experiment would work but he was dying, ineligible for a human heart transplant and had no other option, his son told the Associated Press.
“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” Bennett said a day before the surgery, according to a statement provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead. Last year, there were just over 3,800 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.

“If this works, there will be an endless supply of these organs for patients who are suffering,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, scientific director of the university’s animal-to-human transplant program.
But prior attempts at such transplants – or xenotransplantation – have failed, largely because patients’ bodies rapidly rejected the animal organ. Notably, in 1984, Baby Fae, a dying infant, lived 21 days with a baboon heart.

The difference this time: The Maryland surgeons used a heart from a pig that had undergone gene-editing to remove a sugar in its cells that’s responsible for that hyper-fast organ rejection.

“I think you can characterize it as a watershed event,” Dr. David Klassen, UNOS’ chief medical officer, said of the Maryland transplant.

Still, Klassen cautioned that it’s only a first tentative step into exploring whether this time around, xenotransplantation might finally work.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees xenotransplantation experiments, allowed the surgery under what’s called a “compassionate use” emergency authorization, available when a patient with a life-threatening condition has no other options.

Just last September, researchers in New York performed an experiment suggesting these kinds of pigs might offer promise for animal-to-human transplants. Doctors temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a deceased human body and watched it begin to work.

The Maryland transplant takes their experiment to the next level, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led that experiment at NYU Langone Health.

“This is a truly remarkable breakthrough,” he said in a statement. “As a heart transplant recipient, myself with a genetic heart disorder, I am thrilled by this news and the hope it gives to my family and other patients who will eventually be saved by this breakthrough.”

It will be crucial to share the data gathered from this transplant before opening the option to more patients, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for the first clinical trials under a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“Rushing into animal-to-human transplants without this information would not be advisable,” Maschke said.

The surgery last Friday took seven hours at the Baltimore hospital.

“He realizes the magnitude of what was done and he really realizes the importance of it,” David Bennett Jr. said of his father. “He could not live, or he could last a day, or he could last a couple of days. I mean, we’re in the unknown at this point.”

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed.
Click to expand...
I just saw this on the news. Don’t understand why, but they said due to his condition he was not eligible for a human heart.
 
Chevy1 said:
I just saw this on the news. Don’t understand why, but they said due to his condition he was not eligible for a human heart.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's due to compliance to the privacy provisions of HIPPA, long story.

I can give you a particular regarding liver transplants because we have a family friend in that situation. You're not eligible to GET ON the transplant waiting list if your liver is shot due to alcohol abuse until you've been sober for at least 6 months.

Not sure what the list of exclusions are for heart transplants.
 
Roccus7 said:
Here we go, they're going to keep their paws on our $$ as long as they can...

Treasury warns of ‘enormous challenges’ this tax-filing season that could delay refunds​

Officials predict a number of services could be delayed because of issues related to the pandemic and budget constraints. The tax filing deadline this year is April 18.​


Treasury Department officials on Monday said that the Internal Revenue Service will face “enormous challenges” during this year’s tax filing season, warning of delays to refunds and other taxpayer services.

In a phone call with reporters, Treasury officials predicted a “frustrating season” for taxpayers and tax preparers as a result of delays caused by the pandemic, years of budget cuts to the IRS, and the federal stimulus measures that have added to the tax agency’s workload.

Typically, IRS officials enter filing season with an unaddressed backlog of roughly 1 million returns. This year, however, the IRS will enter the filing season facing “several times” that, Treasury officials said, although they declined to give a more precise estimate. The IRS website says that as of Dec. 23, 2021, it still had 6 million unprocessed individual returns, and as of the start of this month it still had more than 2 million unprocessed amended tax returns, a separate category.

The IRS closed last filing season with more than 35 million unprocessed returns — a fourfold increase from the last year before the pandemic. As the backlog increased, the IRS also failed to respond to the enormous increase in calls for assistance. Only 9 percent of calls were answered by an IRS customer service representative, while only 3 percent were answered for the 1040 support line for individual income tax returns, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate, a watchdog group.

The pandemic forced the closure of many in-person centers where paper forms are processed, while also affecting the IRS workforce. But even before the pandemic, budget cuts to the IRS forced through by Republicans had led to a roughly 25 percent decline in the size of its staff. And these challenges were exacerbated by the federal response to covid, which required the IRS to implement big new programs — from stimulus payments to the expanded Child Tax Credit — for tens of millions of families.

“By definition, no matter how much more efficient you are, you can’t lose 25 percent of the workforce and assume you can do the same volume of work. It’s a problem across the board — information technology; revenue agents; people answering the phones,” said John Koskinen, who served as commissioner of the IRS under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“The fact the filing season has gone so well over the last three years is an amazing tribute to the capacity of the workforce, but if you keep underfunding the place it’s not a question of whether it will have a major problem — it’s a question of when.”

Treasury officials said the tax filing deadline for 2021 income is Monday, April 18. Treasury officials said there are no current plans to extend that deadline this year, urging taxpayers to file as early as possible.
Treasury officials also urged taxpayers to file their returns online and create an account at IRS.gov.

The IRS budget has been significantly cut by roughly 20 percent over the last decade across all four of its major areas of operation — including tax enforcement, taxpayer services, and agency expenses for information technology, among other operational needs.

The decline in taxpayer enforcement has spurred a wave of concern about the ballooning “tax gap,” or the discrepancy between what taxpayers owe and what the agency collects. Nonpartisan estimates put the figure in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The Biden administration has pushed to beef up the IRS’s tax collection budget, hoping to spend $80 billion more on this area, in part because collecting that additional revenue will help it pay for other priorities.

Democratic lawmakers have also pushed to bolster the agency’s funding more broadly through the congressional appropriations process in a way that would offer more taxpayer services. Currently, the IRS budget is approximately $12 billion.

The House of Representatives approved a 14 percent increase to the agency’s budget as part of its budget proposal. But that effort is tied up in the Senate, and the federal government is on track to be funded at existing levels until February. Many Republicans oppose an expansion of the IRS’s budget.

Even if the IRS budget is increased, it would likely not be in time to allow the agency to hire for this filing season. As a result, the IRS heads into its busiest time of year with a workforce that is now the same size as it was in 1970 — even though the U.S. population has grown by 60 percent since that time, according to Treasury officials.

The agency also had fewer than 15,000 people tasked with handling more than 240 million calls, which translates into roughly 16,000 calls per employee. Treasury officials also said there are fewer auditors at the IRS that at any point since World War II.

Roughly 90 percent of taxpayers file their returns electronically, but about 10 percent still mail them in on paper — the category that causes the most delays. The National Taxpayer Advocate’s report from last year points out that many taxpayers filing printed returns would prefer to do so electronically but can’t, because taxpayers are required to submit statements or other forms that the agency does not process online.

Mark Everson, who served as the IRS commissioner during the George W. Bush administration, said “practitioners across the country are very concerned” about the IRS’ ability to handle the upcoming tax season.

“The service has done a good job getting relief payments and Child Tax Credits out the door, but it has a day job of processing tax returns. The filing season is always job one,” Everson said. “They went down early and hard from the pandemic and they’ve never really fully recovered. For both taxpayers and regular practitioners, the inability to get through on the phones is very frustrating.”
Click to expand...
I do not see how they will ever catch up. They were already behind when the pandemic hit. And some offices were completely closed and mail was diverted. Folks receiving letters NOW that 2019 returns are just getting processed. Checks being lost and deposited months after being sent in. In a classic the left not knowing what happened on the right. Checks cashed, easily seen on bank statements, yet receiving a letter from a different office that taxes are not paid. A real mess to say it mildly.
 
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