Until
January 2014, you could go to the IRS website to find the answer to the question, where in the queue is my exemption application? For example, if in January you visited the IRS’s “Where Is My Application?” webpage, it reported that the IRS was “assigning applications received in May 2012.”
As of last month, however, the IRS scraped that page in favor of a new one titled “Where’s My Application.” The page no longer tells you how long the queue is. Instead, it provides the “average date of pending applications.” I got an A in statistics class and find this information to be ambiguous at best. To get clarification, we asked the IRS for an explanation. Apparently what this means is that half [of unassigned applications were received] earlier than that date and half are later than that date.” Thus, as of the date of this posting, about 50% of the exemption application in the IRS queue were received before June 2013 and half received after June 2013.
At a recent conference, the new IRS Commissioner for Tax-Exempt and Governmental Entities, Sunita Lough, proclaimed that the updated Where’s My Application Page is an improvement. Would you agree? We’d love to know. Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
What our clients really want to know is, how long before their exemption application will be reviewed? We asked this question, too, and got some good news. According to a senior exempt organizations manager at the IRS, applications are now being assigned that were received in December of 2012. This is a vast improvement from two months ago, and he is optimistic things will continue to improve.