Some of you might get a second tax refund from the IRS this year

The IRS is playing a massive game of catch-up at the moment, now that we're more than a month beyond this year's extended federal filing deadline of May 17 -- the date that was chosen to give people more time to finalize their taxes as a result of ongoing complications related to the coronavirus pandemic.

To get a sense of how backed up the IRS is, the tax agency says that as of June 23, 2021, it had 17.5 million unprocessed individual federal tax returns in the pipeline still needing to be dealt with. "Unprocessed returns include tax year 2020 returns such as those requiring correction to the Recovery Rebate Credit amount or validation of 2019 income used to figure the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC)," the IRS notes on its official website. "This work does not require us to correspond with taxpayers but does require special handling by an IRS employee, so, in these instances, it is taking the IRS more than 21 days to issue any related refund." And speaking of refunds, some people could actually get a second refund this year, on top of the normal refund they might receive once the IRS processes their tax return. In this post, we'll take a closer look at the IRS unemployment refund, made possible by the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from back in March.