The IRS's 70% recovery rate hides a 55-point regional gap
Summary
A Treasury inspector general audit found the IRS applied 70% of $3.2 billion in unidentified tax payments to taxpayer accounts between FY2022 and FY2024. That headline number blends wildly different outcomes: 94% at the Austin, Texas processing center versus 39% at Kansas City, Missouri. Auditors traced the gap to staffing, not workload -- Ogden, Utah held nearly four times Kansas City's share of the backlog on the same headcount.
A 70% average built from a 39-to-94 range
Break the FY2024 numbers out by center and the average stops looking like a single system. TIGTA's data⧉ shows the Austin, Texas center matched 94% of its inventory to a taxpayer account that year. Ogden, Utah matched 47%. Kansas City, Missouri matched 39% -- meaning six of every ten dollars that landed in Kansas City's unidentified-payment pile sat unresolved for a full year and rolled into the 's Excess Collection account, the government's holding pen for money it can't yet place. Austin's share doing the same was 4%. Auditors note Austin's edge is partly structural -- it also processes Individual Taxpayer Identification Number applications, which clear automatically once an ID number posts -- but that doesn't explain Kansas City trailing Ogden, too.
View data as table
| Austin, TX | 94% |
|---|---|
| Ogden, UT | 47% |
| Kansas City, MO | 39% |
Same headcount, four times the pile
's explanation isn't that Kansas City's staff work slower. It's that the never balanced staff against the size of each center's backlog. In FY2025, the report found⧉, Ogden's Unidentified Remittance unit had the same number of employees as Kansas City's -- despite holding 40% of the 's national unidentified-payment inventory to Kansas City's 11%, roughly 3.6 times the share on the same staff. Then FY2025 made the imbalance worse: the three centers collectively lost 23% of this staff, and Austin -- the center with the most inventory in FY2024 -- lost the most, 41%.
View data as table
| FY2022 | 401,000,000 |
|---|---|
| FY2023 | 236,000,000 |
| FY2024 | 218,000,000 |
| FY2025 | 388,000,000 |
Tracked in spreadsheets, not a system
Underneath the staffing gap is a more basic problem: the has no electronic case-management system for this money. Each center's accounting system runs independently, and examiners assign and track cases by hand in spreadsheets. Auditors found spreadsheets missing case data⧉, and at one center, cases marked "closed" that were never actually closed in systems -- overstating how much work was still open. couldn't even measure how long a typical case takes to resolve, because the tracks no timeliness metric at all. The agency agreed to fix this: build a real case-management system, track referrals in the meantime, and set metrics to measure the work. An interim tracking log went in on May 20, 2025; the system itself has no completion date yet.
The takeaway
- A 70% national average conceals a 55-point range. Kansas City matched 39% of its unidentified payments to a taxpayer account in FY2024; Austin matched 94%. Some of that gap is structural -- Austin also processes ITIN applications -- but auditors point to staffing imbalance, not workload type, as the driver.
- The gap traces to staffing, not effort. Ogden held roughly 3.6 times Kansas City's share of the national backlog on the same headcount, and FY2025 staffing cuts fell hardest on Austin -- the center with the most inventory to work.
- $959 million of the three-year total was never applied to an account within the window measured -- $741 million moved to Excess Collections or was removed as dishonored, and $218 million was still open when the audit period closed.
- There's no system tracking any of it. The manages this backlog through three disconnected accounting systems and hand-kept spreadsheets, with no timeliness metric; 's three recommendations -- a case-management system, interim tracking, and evaluative metrics -- were all accepted, but the system itself remains unbuilt.
's audit covered FY2022 through FY2024 for the $3.2 billion figure and its 70/23/7 breakdown; the FY2024 center-by-center match rates and the FY2025 staffing figures come from separate, more recent slices of the same report. The $741 million describes as "closed" includes both payments moved to Excess Collections after a year unresolved and payments removed because a check was dishonored or voided; the report doesn't split out how much of the $741 million falls into each category.
Sources(1) ▾
- Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), IRS Programs That Resolve Billions of Dollars in Unidentified Taxpayer Payments Need to Be Improved and Modernized (Report No. 2026-400-024) (2026-05-21) — final audit report on the effectiveness of efforts to identify and resolve missing or misapplied taxpayer payments (the 'unidentified payment' and 'hardcore payment tracer' programs), issued May 21, 2026 following fieldwork at the 's Austin, Kansas City, and Ogden Tax Processing Centers, August 2024-January 2026. Fetched directly via curl and read with pdftotext -layout; a Wayback Machine capture from 2026-06-06 exists as a backup. tigta.gov · original document
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When a check or electronic payment arrives at the without enough information to match it to a taxpayer -- a missing name, ID number, or tax period -- it doesn't bounce. It goes into limbo: the Unidentified Remittance File, a holding account at whichever of the 's three Tax Processing Centers received it. A Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration audit⧉ found that from FY2022 through FY2024, $3.2 billion in payments landed there. The eventually matched 70% of it to an account. That single number is the one leads with. It also hides how differently the three centers that do this work actually perform.