Taxpayers felt a slowdown in the IRS’s processing of paper returns this filing season due in part to a reduction in experienced IT acquisition staff, according to a watchdog report released Monday. Despite a 19% year-over-year decrease in the number of paper returns it received, the tax agency processed 46% fewer individual paper returns and 80% fewer business paper returns over the same time period, the Government Accountability Office found. Per IRS officials, the system to process individual paper returns was unavailable for the first six weeks of 2026, while the scanning system for business paper returns was out of commission for the entirety of the most recent filing season. The IRS sent 3.7 million business paper returns to outside vendors alone, a 725% year-over-year jump. Vendors ended up processing more than four times the number of business paper returns than agency staff, the report stated.