The IRS is impossibly busy.
I'm waiting on the rest of my 2020 refund. I filed electronically on March 21, corrected an error they notified me about on June 17, and received about half of my refund on October 13.
I've tried calling numerous times. I've tried making an appointment. No dice.
At this point, from the tea leaves I can see I think I'm waiting on a letter from them, and I think they need me to prove that my daughter is actually my daughter. Even though she's almost 20, and I've been claiming her as my dependent with the same name and SSN for about, oh, 20 years.
They're busy with:
1. 2020 tax changes from the American Rescue Plan Act passed in March 2021. The law changed the taxability of the first ~$10K of unemployment income, and eliminated the payback penalty for ACA subsidies.
2. They may still be doing work related to the stimulus payments. There were provisions in the law to make catch up payments to people who were newly eligible based on their 2020 tax return for EIP3.
3. They're busy implementing the advance-able child tax credit payments. This, by the way, is going to be a complete mess for tax preparers next spring. I've seen several complaints from parents about payments that are missing, wrong amounts, and differing amounts.
4. They're probably still catching up from the coronavirus impact, where they had to work from home (harder and slower to do). I've read that lots of taxpayer mail is just sitting in warehouses waiting to be processed. It's supposedly FIFO, which is at least something.
And it has not happened yet, but if the current social spending / climate bill passes, the IRS will be even more buried with the additional complex tax changes. Although there is funding in the bill for the IRS to increase enforcement, it's unclear whether there is any funding to handle the tax changes themselves.