Major changes affecting taxpayers this tax season. What to know before filing.

Tax season is now underway, and with that come some major changes that may impact your return this year. 

This is due to the "Big Beautiful Bill" and job cuts at the Internal Revenue Service. 

This year, changes through the bill mean tax breaks like eliminating taxes on some overtime and tipped income, and raising the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, from $10,000 to $40,000.

"There's a new deduction for car interest paid throughout the year, and there's an enhanced senior deduction," said H&R Block tax researcher and expert, Brittany Benson.

"Just a lot of moving parts this year, a lot of changes and slightly new rules for taxpayers to have to handle," she said.

According to Benson, for those impacted by rule changes, getting returns in early might be a good idea.

"We always encourage people to file early," she said.

With the rule changes happening after a year, where CBS Chicago investigators last year exposed issues with the IRS backlogs, coinciding with staffing issues and thousands of jobs cut.

It also exposed delays with an IRS payment system, causing some taxpayers who met the April deadline to receive notices that they still owed money.

How does that look now? A new report from the Department of Treasury revealed staffing dropped by more than 18,000 from 2024 to 2025. Eight thousand of those no longer employed were directly responsible for processing returns and answering questions. In addition, backlogs increased from 1.5 million to 2 million during that same time frame.

The report also indicated the government shutdown might have impacted the ability to hire and onboard new workers. Spokespeople for the IRS wouldn't clarify that, acknowledging the requests, but still not addressing specific questions.

However, as of Dec. 30, 2025, the Submission Processing function had onboarded just 50 of the 2,200, or 2%, employees it was approved to hire. The report indicates that onboarding takes 60-80 days. 

There's also a Taxpayer Advocate report that was released on Jan. 28. Slightly different numbers, but called out staffing issues even with recent hiring.

It read in part, "Of particular importance for taxpayer service are customer service representatives who answer telephone calls and process taxpayer correspondence and casework. The IRS generally receives over 100 million telephone calls and several million pieces of taxpayer correspondence each year. In 2025, the number of CSRs was reduced by 22%. Although the IRS backfilled some of these positions late in the year, the number of CSRs remains substantially lower than last filing season, and the new hires have less experience than the employees who departed."

Benson recommends taking extra care with your return. 

"Someone who's going to make sure that your return is accurate when it's completed, and that they are submitting it in the way that is most successful for IRS. You don't want to have to fall into a special processing, so we're avoiding that," she said.