According to this article, the possibility exists.
The Internal Revenue Service is looking hard at delaying the start of its filing season, set for Jan. 14, if Congress fails to pass legislation in the next two weeks. At issue is how to handle what could be a dramatic increase in the number of people facing a higher alternative minimum tax.
That “dramatic” increase?
[Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson said the 25 million returns that could be affected in 2007 would pay, on average, an additional $2,000 in federal income tax.
[…]
Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that, without a fix, about half of taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes in the $75,000 to $100,000 range will be affected by the alternative minimum tax this year.
Delaying the start of the season – the earliest date which returns can be filed – would have the effect of delaying refunds. According to the article:
The IRS oversight board, using past agency data, said that if the start of the filing season is pushed back two weeks to Jan. 28, it would delay some 5.6 million refunds, totaling $17 billion. A Feb. 18 starting date would delay 37.7 million refunds, totaling $87 billion.
Congress passed legislation November 9, but because of PayGo, also passed complimentary tax increases to offset the $80 million ($50 million for AMT, $30 million for other tax relief). Bush has said he will veto any bill with tax increases.
I really wish Congress would get legislation like this done earlier. (The Virginia General Assembly is even worse, by the way, often passing legislation that is retroactive.) I would hate to think that folks who are counting on their refunds would have them delayed because of this.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
How about if there was no tax season at all, and April 15th was just another lovely Spring day?
http://www.FairTax.org
I wondered how long it would take somebody to post that 😉
Of course, this is the tax season we have now, not the one we would wish to have.
Yeah, I bet it drives CPAs nuts. 🙂
Did they do this kind of crap in the 80s*? Or is this all a product of the Gingrich-Clinton showdowns of the 90s?
*When thinking of 80s fiscal policies, I am mostly reminded of my DODDS teachers telling me that if I had to know the reason we couldn’t write in the workbooks, instead of copying them to paper, I should ask Phil Gramm and Warren Rudmann. My recollections of the budget battles of the 80s are narrow, but deep. 🙂
I really have little recollection of anything like this in the 80s. I was working for the government in the early 80s and had no need to pay attention then. It seems like to me that while we had a lot of tax law changes in the late 80s (I started my practice in 1986), they were mostly finished on time. I don’t recall ever having had a potential delay in the start of the season.
Now on the state side, we seem to always have the GA making rules during the current session that are retroactive to the prior year. One that comes up every year of late is the conformity date. (Virginia conforms to federal law but they pass a bill each year to set the date.) I just looked at my emails for tax year 2006 – the conformity date was rolled to 12/31/06 on February 22, 2007. The year before it was March 17, nearly three months into the filing season. Now it takes some time for the software to catch up – both mine and the state’s – so what ends up happening is that we have to figure out which returns are affected and file amended returns.
Since the GA seems unwilling to pass the legislation in advance, the very first bill they take up each year should be this one. (Or they could simply go back to the old way of conforming to IRS rules, like they used to.)