IRS destroyed 30M taxpayer documents, as they faced a backlog

The title has been editorialized to imply that the IRS destroyed documents because they couldn't be bothered to process them.

That's not true.

The actual article title is: IRS destroys 30 million tax documents, insists ‘no negative taxpayer consequences’

> "The IRS uses these documents to conduct post-processing compliance matches to identify taxpayers who do not accurately report their income."

So they destroyed documents that were already processed. Further, the article is unclear on whether these documents were set fire to or automatically deleted by computer systems.

Great? No. What I expected from the submitted title? No.

I am still waiting on my refund from 2020. The IRS had a question, I uploaded a missing document to their portal - they said they never got it. Then I called and was told they would release the refund as they actually had the document, but their software couldn’t process it - still nothing. I sent them the same ‘missing’ document to them again via certified mail months ago - still waiting.