WASHINGTON (Michigan News Source) – The freedom of slaves in Washington D.C., an event that was established on April 16, 1862, has also become a celebration of the freedom from filing taxes in the United States this year. Because of Emancipation Day, which is only officially observed in Washington D.C., Tax Day has been moved from April 15th to April 18th due to the weekend and the nation’s capital observing the holiday on a Monday. The result is that Tax Day for the entire country was pushed back three days.

Emancipation Day celebrates the end of slavery in Washington D.C. It freed about 3,100 individuals eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation liberated slaves in the south. It is the only part of the United States that compensated slave owners for freeing enslaved persons that they held. They also offered newly freed men and women money to emigrate.

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It was President Abraham Lincoln who helped get the bill through Congress and in doing so he issued a statement almost 161 years ago that said, “I have never doubted the constitutional authority of Congress to abolish slavery in this District, and I have ever desired to see the National Capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory day.”

Lincoln could not have anticipated the fact that the signing of the bill would also lead to a public holiday in the District starting in 2005, giving government workers in Washington D.C. the day off and Tax Day being occasionally delayed. But that is the case this year.

With more than 168 million individual tax returns expected to be filed this year, it’s very likely that the IRS agents will need this break before they get back to dealing with all of those returns. With the 2023 tax season officially beginning on January 23rd (for 2022 returns), the IRS has already began to accept and process 2022 tax year returns with the help of the extra 5,000 new telephone assistors and additional staff hired with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell said about the additional funding, “This filing season is the first to benefit the IRS and our nation’s tax system from multi-year funding in the Inflation Reduction Act. With these new additional resources, taxpayers and tax professionals will see improvements in many areas of the agency this year. We’ve trained thousands of new employees to answer phones and help people. While much work remains after several difficult years, we expect people to experience improvements this tax season. That’s just the start as we work to add new long-term transformation efforts that will make things even smoother in future years. We are very excited to begin to deliver what taxpayers want and our employees know we could do with this funding.”

 

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