Hey, everybody. We’re talking about the weekly Employee Retention Credit. This is our Q&A session that we do here every Monday. And there's some good things here that you'll definitely want to pay attention to. The Treasury Inspector General, they are kind of the watchdog of the Internal Revenue Service performed an internal audit on the IRS back. The report came out at the end of August, and they're talking about well, they look at several different COVID related employee benefit programs, including the Employee Retention Credit that we talk about on here all the time. And this is, this is good information on where they are in the batch of unprocessed 941Xs. That's the report of quarterly employee payroll that you report the Employee Retention Credit on. And so here's, here's what it is.
I'm taking this from the Kiplinger Tax letter. That's a tax professional publication that scours the headlines for things related to Internal Revenue Service news. And this, I'll just read you the thing directly. The IRS still has a large batch of unprocessed 941X's. 199,000 of them as of September 21, 2022. Many of these quarterly payroll tax returns were filed by employers to amend their original filings to claim temporary covid breaks, such as the sick and family medical leave credit, and the employee retention tax credit. IRS is making a dent on these returns. As of February the first of this year, there were over 447,000 of them. So that's our starting point, roughly seven months ago. Now we know why there's such a long processing delay. The service didn't start working on claims for the credits until 12 months after the legislation granting these tax credits was enacted according to the treasury inspectors. So if you'll recall, this thing started alongside really the Paycheck Protection Program back in about March or April of 2020. So these came out really side by side, and at that point it was really non-refundable credits that people were seeking.
It was kind of confusing, two sets of laws there because they were saying that you couldn't take the ERC if you were also taking the Paycheck Protection Program. That has changed through multiple iterations of this legislation, and so now you can take both. But it looks like the IRS was so backlogged there with other things that they didn't even start this thing. And I've read the Treasury Inspector General's report. It's mainly because of training. And well, they're saying a lack of updated computer programming, guidance, and training all contributed to that delay. So they didn't even get started on this probably until roughly April of 2021. And it's stacked up, as I mentioned, to 447,000 by February of this year. But they've cut it down to, if you do the math there, there's 199,000 of them. That's 248,000 got done there since February the first and leading up to this report.
So that comes out to roughly 31,000 amendments being processed per month. So, what we can take from that, and obviously these are just round numbers and we're just averaging things here, but all things being equal, most of these then to knock through 248,000 of them, the current that's the progress that they made to get through 199,000 of them is going to take roughly six and a half months. So that's very much in line with what we've talked about before. As it relates to the ERC, roughly a six-month turnaround, six to nine months, we were expecting it possibly to be much longer. But those are, those are very decent numbers according to the Treasury Inspector General report. That would put us roughly in about March 15th or so, middle of March of 2023 to knock through that current backlog. So that's pretty good news.
It's good to see that those things are moving along. I would expect that there's going to be more and more of these as more and more employers start to figure out what this is and to figure out, most importantly, that some of these quarters are starting to go away. They'll start to completely time out. You won't be able to file 941Xs after three years from when they were filed. So that'll start phasing out really in July of 2023. And it'll just keep going. You know, it'll knock off a quarter and a quarter and a quarter every single quarter. So good to know. And if you need any help with
The ERC, look at the information in the bio below. We'd love to help you out with this. It's a little bit of a confusing set of things, but hopefully that gives you a little hope. If you've got a pending ERC out there, it's looking good, looking like six months. All right. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.