It's been 19 months for woman waiting on $686 tax refund after dad's death. How to speed up getting what you're owed

Every year, thousands of families not lone woody with the decease of a loved one, but besides with each the accompanying paperwork — including last taxation returns.

But tiny mistakes similar missing forms oregon incorrect signatures telephone stall refunds for months. And for grieving families, this tin make unnecessary fiscal strain astatine a clip erstwhile they’re already nether profound affectional strain.

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Anne Tergesen, a newsman with the Wall Street Journal, precocious shared her acquisition of trying to settee her precocious father’s estate. It’s each wrapped up but for his 2023 taxation refund of $686, which is preventing her from settling his estate. At the clip of penning the story, it had been 19 months since she’d filed the instrumentality (1).

“Such delays are communal for radical sorting the estates of loved ones,” she wrote. But determination are a fewer ways you tin trim tax-related delays.

From January 2021 done July 2024, the IRS processed 609,953 manual refunds for deceased taxpayers. It took an mean of 444 calendar days to process and contented these refunds, according to a study (2) by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

In 440,443 cases wherever a refund was due, 43% of these were outstanding for 1 to 2 years and 9% were outstanding for much than 2 years (2). For comparison’s sake, electronically filed Form 1040 returns are mostly processed wrong 21 days, according to the IRS (3).

One of the bottlenecks Tergesen said she experienced, and a communal 1 for different filers, was the processing of the Form 1310 Statement of Person Claiming Refund Due a Deceased Taxpayer.

You’re required to record a Form 1310 unless you’re a surviving spouse filing an archetypal oregon amended associated instrumentality with the decedent oregon you’re a idiosyncratic typical filing an archetypal Form 1040, 1040-SR, 1040-NR oregon 1040-SS for the decedent (which has the tribunal certificate showing your assignment attached).

Previously, these forms had to beryllium filed successful insubstantial format, which required manual processing — and was a large crushed for processing delays. For instance, if an IRS worker requested a Form 1310, the taxpayer’s effect would instrumentality 3 weeks, connected average, to beryllium routed to the worker erstwhile it was received by the IRS, according to the TIGTA report.