The Internal Revenue Service issued $296 billion in refunds during the 2026 filing season, a 17% increase from the previous year, as millions of Americans benefited from President Donald Trump’s signature tax law, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
The increase represented $43 billion more in refunds than the IRS had issued during the 2025 filing season for tax year 2024. The average refund also increased by $333, or 11%, compared with the previous year, according to the full report.
The GAO attributed the larger refunds, in part, to millions of taxpayers claiming new deductions created by recent tax law changes in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), including provisions allowing deductions for qualified tips and overtime.
The IRS also issued more refunds overall, sending out more than 8 million additional refunds compared with 2025.
The increase in refunds came as the agency faced delays affecting taxpayers who received their money by paper check.
The GAO found that the IRS’s overall processing performance had remained similar to the previous year, with the agency processing about 98% of the 177 million individual and business returns it had received during the filing season.
Still, taxpayers who had filed paper returns or relied on paper refund checks had faced significant delays.
"Most paper check refunds were delayed by weeks," the GAO reported, as the IRS had moved toward issuing refunds primarily through direct deposit.
The IRS sent approximately 4.2 million notices to taxpayers by early May asking them to provide bank account information to allow for electronic delivery of their refunds.
Taxpayers who had not responded were told they would receive a paper check after six weeks.
As a result, the number of paper-check refunds issued by early April had plunged more than 80%, from about 2.8 million in 2025 to roughly 493,000 in 2026. Those who had received paper checks waited an average of 36 days, compared with 13 days the previous year.
The GAO found that the IRS had therefore taken about three times longer to issue paper-check refunds than it had in 2025.
Taxpayers using direct deposit generally avoided the worst of the delays.
According to the report, nine out of 10 refunds issued through direct deposit had arrived within 21 days.
Source:
Diem ‘Richard’ Nguyen
Liên Minh Bảo Hiến Mỹ Gốc Việt
Vietnamese American Conservative Alliance (VACA)
https://freedom-vaca.org/vaca-blog-tieng-viet-nam/