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Taxpayers should be prepared for increased delays this filing season as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) continues to work through a backlog of returns from previous years.

More than eight million individual returns, including two million amended returns from multiple tax years awaited processing as of mid-February.

Every return represents a family or individual waiting for their return, and its likely that in some cases, it has nothing to do with how they filed their taxes, rather it stems from delays and staffing struggles inside the IRS itself.

NBC 5 Responds has heard from many consumers, writing in to share their tax return delay woes. They are certainly not alone.

The recent National Taxpayer Advocates annual report to Congress states customer service representatives at the IRS were only able to answer 11% of calls from the public received in 2021.

Racquel Johnson from the Dallas-Fort Worth area understands that more than most.

You hold [on the phone] for two hours and then it disconnects you. You never get to talk to anybody, and that's constant, all day, Racquel told NBC 5 Responds. Raquel is still waiting for her 2019 amended return that she filed in January 2020 to be processed.

Statistics from the National Taxpayer Advocates report show in 2021, the number of calls from the public to the IRS increased by more than 180% compared to the previous year.

For people lucky enough to get through to a representative, there hasnt been much good news on the other end.

I call every month and they tell me it takes 12 weeks to be reviewed, it has now been eight months, Marianne Carlson of Arlington Heights told NBC 5 Responds. Carlson said her amended refund is in the thousands.

Since 2010, the IRS workforce shrunk by 17% while the number of individual taxpayers has increased by 19%, according to the National Taxpayer Advocates report.

While Congress provided one-time additional funding to implement pandemic-relief programs for Americans, the IRS has had to cope with pandemic problems itself. Processing center staffing was limited with social distancing, while some centers closed altogether.

Thats why the IRS is urging everyone to consider some specific points when filing this year, in hopes to avoid a delayed refund.

To avoid delays, an IRS spokesperson recommends the following:

Its important to not file until all forms are received from employers, applicable banking accounts, and any other income you must report. That includes two new letters about the most recent stimulus checks and advance child tax credit.

IRS letter 6475, the Economic Impact Payment letter, can help people claim the 2021 COVID-19 recovery rebate credit. The letter helps taxpayers determine if they are entitled to claim the stimulus payment, deposited to the first recipients in March 2021, when filing their return this tax season.

IRS letter 6419, the Advance Child Tax Credit payments letter, can help people get the remainder of their 2021 child tax credit. The letter gives the total amount credited in 2021 and the number of qualifying children used to calculate the advance payments.

Eligible families who didnt receive any advance child tax credit payments can claim the full amount on their 2021 federal tax return, including families who don't normally need to file a tax return.

Before you pay for tax preparation or an online software, see if you qualify for free filing resources.

The IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly programs work with:

You can use the IRS lookup tool to find a local site to help. Enter your ZIP code and select how far youre willing to travel from the drop-down menu.

The City of Chicago also has a free filing service through Ladder Up for most families earning up to $58,000 annually and individuals making $32,000 or less. Appointments can be made online or by calling (312) 588-6900.

If you dont qualify for free tax preparation, you may be eligible to use a free software program to file your own tax return. Taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $73,000 or less, can file taxes for free through the IRS Free File Program. It is a public-private partnership between the IRS and tax filing software companies. Some companies may charge an additional fee to file an Illinois return.

If youre comfortable navigating basic questions about your income taxes and dont qualify for any of these programs, you may still be able to file your return for free through the United Ways myfreetaxes.com.

The due date to file the 2021 federal income tax return is April 18.

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Waiting For The Refund: How To Prevent Tax Return Delays This Year - NBC Chicago

Already in its short four months of life, Tysons, Virginia-based regulatory compliance tech company RegScale has already racked up a few noteworthy achievements.

In January, Technical.ly awarded it an honorable mention spot on our annual RealLIST Startups roundup. That came after the company, which spun out of digital services firm C2 Labs in late 2021, raised $1.5 million from the Virginia Innovation Partnerships Corporation and New Dominion Angelsto help build out its technology late last year.

Compliance tech which helps companies manage their regulatory requirements and needs is something that CEO Anil Karmel said is new to the security world. Up until now, he told Technical.ly, companies would often maintain their compliance needs in Excel sheets. RegScale, meanwhile, helps keep paperwork up to date in an API-centric SaaS platform.

Thats just the way its been done its the way it continues to be done, Karmel told Technical.ly. So our thesis was leveraged in the regulatory technology space, which is what we say is the reg tech space: how can we service this bridge between security and compliance so its not either-or, its and?'

With RegScale, Karmel said, he hopes to bring the principles of DevOps to compliance in an idea he calls regulatory operations or RegOps. The platform, which is built with Angular, .NET and SQL, is designed to deploy in a number of existing systems. The RegScale platform will make system audits, issue plans of action, assess risks and note upcoming deadlines and tasks in compliance, among other offerings. Theres both a free model and a paid edition of the software, Karmel said, because he believes compliance should be affordable.

Anil Karmel. (Photo via LinkedIn)

On the whole, he hopes that RegScale can help companies move away from the traditional methods of compliance that have been done for decades.

Were calling it the RegOps movement, Karmel said. Every movement begins with a single step and we have technology, but its also a cultural change. So its helping organizations understand, and people understand, theres a new way to do compliance.

RegScale was funded out of C2 Labs, and the spinout closed an early round of capital after incubating its technology internally, Karmel said. In November, it raised the aforementioned $1.5 million for its research and development arm, including staffing that division. The company is currently hiring for operations staff in Virginia and will continue building out RegScale here. The founder is also hoping to build a large partner ecosystem where companies can further integrate RegScale into their systems.

But in the nearer future, the company is still looking to grow. Next, Karmel and RegScale intend to open a Series A, which will lead to even more hiring. (See open role here.)

Then and now, Karmel said hell keep an eye out for folks looking to make a change in compliance and regulation tech:If youre looking to reimagine an industry with a new innovative technology to reimagine compliance, both from a technology standpoint as well as from an implementation standpoint, those are folks wed love to talk to.

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This Tysons startup is upending the regulatory compliance space with software - Technical.ly

It may seem like a highly unlikely pairing, but acquiring Bandcamp does align with Epic's broadening ambitions for the metaverse as well as CEO Tim Sweeney's intent to create a version of the internet that more closely aligns with the company's vision for Fortnite.

Epic has acquired a number of companies over the past few years, thanks to the success of Fortnite, that hint at its focus on building a small empire at the intersection of entertainment, technology and social media, including social video app Houseparty and Guitar Hero and Rock Band developer Harmonix.

Sweeney, often in public statements in both the antitrust trial against Apple and on Twitter, has voiced his concern about Big Tech's dominance and his fear that such control will extend to the metaverse, which has become a kind of stand-in for the next-generation version of the internet that combines social media, gaming and entertainment with technologies like virtual and augmented reality.

With Bandcamp, Epic seems to have found a like-minded platform. It's also one with a sterling reputation among musicians for treating creators fairly in a way that could benefit Fortnite and Epic's plans for the metaverse, given how pricey traditional media licensing deals can be.

We couldnt be more excited to welcome the Bandcamp team to Epic Games, Epic Game Store chief Steve Allison said in a statement. Bandcamp has built an incredible community and business where up and coming artists can succeed thanks to the direct support of their fans, with one of the best revenue models and terms in music. This aligns closely with Epics approach to supporting creators across all media and enabling them to connect directly with their fans.

"In Epic, weve found a partner who believes as deeply as we do that the future of music, and art itself, depends on the creation of equitable and inclusive communities like the one our fans and artists have helped to build," said Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond in a statement. "Were excited to work alongside the Epic team to accelerate the realization of our mission and pursue our shared goal of empowering more creators in a fair and open way.

The acquisition naturally raises some questions about what this might mean for the future of Bandcamp. We don't yet have clarity on whether Epic will make any changes to Bandcamp's revenue model (including Bandcamp Fridays) or what happens to Bandcamp's editorial operation.

In a separate message on the company's website and Twitter account, Diamond said Bandcamp will remain a standalone marketplace, with Diamond at the helm, and that there will be no immediate changes to Bandcamp's business model. Diamond says Epic will primarily be helping Bandcamp for now with "basics like our album pages, mobile apps, merch tools, payment system, and search and discovery features, to newer initiatives like our vinyl pressing and live streaming services."

"The products and services you depend on arent going anywhere, well continue to build Bandcamp around our artists-first revenue model (where artists net an average of 82% of every sale), youll still have the same control over how you offer your music, Bandcamp Fridays will continue as planned, and the Daily will keep highlighting the diverse, amazing music on the site," Diamond wrote. "We share a vision of building the most open, artist-friendly ecosystem in the world, and together well be able to create even more opportunities for artists to be compensated fairly for their work."

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Amazon is expanding its 'free college' benefit and adding ESL classes - Protocol

Samsung introduced its Expert Raw app in beta at the end of 2021; currently, it is only available for the S21 Ultra. The app allows you to control manual exposure settings for all four of the rear cameras, which is nice, but the more interesting thing it allows you to do is shoot multi-frame RAW files. Heres what you need to know about Expert RAW what it is, why its useful, and how to use it.

The short answer is that its RAW but better. In general, RAW shooting saves more data than a JPEG image file, which is a huge benefit if you prefer to fine-tune things like white balance and exposure photo editing software. JPEGs are smaller and more easily shareable, but those kinds of settings are baked in to save space, and theyre much less flexible for post-processing. Plenty of smartphones offer a traditional RAW shooting mode but with a major disadvantage to shooting a standard JPEG image.

When you take a photo in your phones native camera app, the resulting JPEG (or HEIC) file often includes data from multiple frames that were captured very quickly when you pressed the shutter button. This allows the phone to create a single image file with wider dynamic range, making a backlit subject brighter without adding a whole lot of ugly noise, for example.

Traditional RAW mode on a smartphone (or any camera) captures a single frame thats more flexible for editing than a typical JPEG but loses out on the computational benefits that come with the multi-frame processing youd get with the JPEG. This makes shooting RAW on a smartphone kind of pointless, to put it bluntly. Smartphones have very small sensors and lenses relative to traditional cameras, and they use these computational tricks to capture more image data and compensate for that size disadvantage. As a result, its usually better to just let your phone do its thing and take a JPEG.

Multi-frame RAW, which several phone manufacturers (including Apple) have introduced, makes RAW much more useful, especially when youre taking a photo with your phone. You get the best of both worlds: data from multiple frames recorded into a single file, plus plenty of flexibility for editing.

The Galaxy S22 series, including the standard S22, S22 Plus, and S22 Ultra, have all supported Expert RAW as of February 25th. Samsung plans to expand support to some older models, but there are certain hardware requirements a phone has to meet to be able to run Expert RAW, so only a handful of other top-tier devices will offer it. That list includes:

The feature isnt included in the standard Samsung camera app; its actually an entirely separate app that needs to be downloaded from the Galaxy Store. Open the store app and search for Expert RAW. Once youve downloaded it and agreed to give it access to your camera and microphone, youre ready to start shooting multi-frame RAW files.

The Expert RAW interface is similar to the Pro mode in the standard camera app, including the letter icons at the bottom of the screen that indicate the 0.6x, 1x, and 3x lens options. When you press the shutter, youll see text urging you to hold the phone still while the phone grabs multiple frames. Related: Expert RAW isnt something youll want to use for moving subjects.

The resulting files are big around 30MB to 40MB each in my testing. Theres a high-efficiency RAW option you can toggle on if you tap the settings icon on the shooting screen, but it only saved me a couple of MBs per image. Unless you bought a phone with massive storage, youll want to stick to using Expert RAW when it will really make a difference, not all the time.

Expert RAW files are saved as standard DNG files, so you can take them into any RAW processing software that you like. Samsung includes a Lightroom shortcut in the Expert RAW app, but if you want to go that route, youll need to download Lightroom from the Galaxy Store and log in with an Adobe account. Downloading from the Galaxy Store entitles you to a two-month free trial, but after that, youll need to pony up for the $119 annual subscription.

In any case, you can tap the share icon when reviewing your image to take your photo into a free app like Snapseed or save it to cloud storage to edit on a desktop.

With your image in the editing software of your choice, youll enjoy more freedom to push shadows or pull back highlights than with a standard RAW file. I took a standard RAW and a multi-frame RAW of the same backlit scene for comparison purposes, and the difference is significant. Pushing the shadow slider all the way +100 on both photos, theres some clear banding in the standard RAW, while the Expert RAW looks much cleaner.

So when youre shooting a scene with a wide dynamic range, this is definitely the better RAW mode to use just dont get too trigger-happy if you want to go easy on your phones storage.

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How to use Expert RAW on Samsung Galaxy S22, S22 Plus, and S22 Ultra - The Verge

This morning Airbase, a startup in the corporate spend space, announced that it is working with Amex on a pilot that will see its service offered to certain customers of the credit giant. The deal also included a strategic investment, which TechCrunch reads as a modestly sized check, given that the dollar figure was not disclosed.

Normally we dont cover announcements that lack hard figures like investment totals, but the Airbase deal is worth our time because the startup was willing to share a host of its own growth metrics.

The corporate spend market is also a notable startup battleground, with Airbase competing with other well-known firms, including Brex (which most recently raised $300 million), Ramp ($200 million in its most recent round) and Divvy (sold to Bill.com for $2.5 billion). The move by Amex to invest in and work with one of the competing startup players in the corporate spend market could provide a tailwind to the selected player, perhaps helping it scale more rapidly than its rivals. So, from our perspective of startup tracking, the news matters.

TechCrunch spoke with Airbase CEO Thejo Kote about the deal, and his companys recent progress. Per the executive, Airbases annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew threefold in 2021, with payment volume rising eightfold in the same time period. Those numbers are why the corporate spend category is so investor-attractive the sheer work of helping companies manage their spend is huge business, and one that is seeing increasing segmentation as it matures. (TechCrunchs Mary Ann Azevedo has more here.)

Kote, for example, said that 80% of his companys ARR now comes from mid-market and early enterprise segments, or customers with between 100 and 5,000 employees. Divvy, in contrast, has had an SMB focus, traditionally.

The Airbase-Amex deal will have a crawl, walk, run cadence, according to American Express Ventures managing director Margaret Lim. In an interview, she told TechCrunch that the first phase of the tie-up will include a select group of customers to start. From there, we presume, it will expand, provided that things commence smoothly.

Amexs venture arm was loathe to detail much about its operations, including how it prices deals, so we arent clear precisely on how the new funds were valued in share-terms. Airbases last known price tag was set at $600 million on a post-money basis after the company raised $60 million last year, according to Crunchbase data. Given the short period of time from that deal to today, it doesnt seem too likely that Airbase was dramatically repriced by the deal.

That Amex is partnering with Airbase is notable, but not a huge surprise: The corporate credit giant also works with Concur, for example, and what Airbase and its competitors are building has obvious market resonance. So much so that other startups are looking to replicate it elsewhere in the world, TechCrunch has reported and Amex doesnt want something big that could be considered a potential direct competitor to wind up owning the future.

We asked Lim about how Amex decides to build, versus buy. Or, more simply, why the company doesnt simply create its own version of Airbase software instead of working with an external provider that has a competing corporate card product. According to the investor, innovation is speeding up, and with a goal of delivering the best set of products as possible in a timely fashion to its customers, partnering can be a way to reduce time to market.

As to why Amex chose Airbase over a competing startup, it appears to have come down to what we might describe as software quality. Lim said that before her team invests, it meets all players, centering its thinking around customer needs. From that perspective, the investment arm of American Express said that Airbase was a no-brainer, given what Lim described as an intuitive interface that makes a sophisticated toolset simple to use.

Translating a bit, it appears that Amex did its homework and decided that Airbase has the best software in the market for corporate spend work. Thats a compliment, but once again not a surprise.

The corporate spend category has long had two main camps, as TechCrunch has discussed. One portion of startups competing in the market for managing companys cash outflows doesnt charge for its cards, or any software provided. Instead, they make revenues off interchange fees, small slices of transaction value that card issuers collect from customer transactions. Ramp sits in this half of the divide.

The other portion of the market has collected interchange fees, and charged for their software offerings. Airbase started in this camp, which Brex joined the other quarter.

Airbase took the we charge for software concept a bit further last year, when it decided to offer a free tier of its service and remit essentially all interchange incomes to customers as a cash perk; this was the company effectively saying that it could eat on its software incomes alone, which is why we were happy when the startup disclosed its recent ARR growth.

Summing briefly, as Airbase has long had to build software that it could charge for and this is our read of the market it has likely had a larger focus on its codebase than some of its rivals. So to see Amex pick it over its rivals as a partner is not a massive shock to our collective systems.

Still, there are other major card providers in the market who could tie up with rivals, so dont take the Amex news as a coronation. Its more confirmation that what startups are building has the attention of major players, companies that want to put capital to work along with access to their customer base.

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Airbase teams up with Amex on corporate spend, raises a little capital from the giant - TechCrunch