Nearly two out of every three taxpayers who filed with the Dispute Resolution Office (DED) in September won their dispute with the IRS – an impressive ratio.
This is the first time in the history of the Department of the Independent State Revenue Administration that such a high level of approval of taxpayer complaints has been recorded. This is because most of the successful cases involved retirees who resorted to DEDs even for small amounts of retroactive contributions, and almost all were justified.
Typically, the number of complaints received by this office is between 35% and 40% each month.
September also saw another record: DED reviewed 1,201 cases, up from 500 in the previous months. This acceleration is due to the fact that many of these cases fell on the October 29 deadline. Consequently, the tax administration demanded that DED staff work overtime to look into as many cases as possible, which turned out to be the right decision: hundreds of retirees who were now acquitted would otherwise have to submit to their tax office’s verdict, given that there was no it would make no sense to resort to justice when the amounts at stake were so small.
The figures released by the IAPR show that of 1201 complaints filed, 752 were partially or fully accepted, 427 were rejected, and 22 taxpayers withdrew their claims.
Despite the fact that the number of cases reviewed increased by 129%, there are still many unresolved complaints in DED: in September, the number of pending cases was 9,646, so that only an eighth of them were processed. Rather than dropping to 8,445, they stood at 9,080 at the end of September due to new cases filed around 300 every 10 days.
The IAPR figures show that although there were only 1,834 cases in progress as of September 1, 2019, the backlog increased to 5,705 in 2020 due to restrictions and reached 9,080 in September 2021.
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