The IRS took a little longer to get refunds processed this year, especially if you filed early in the reporting season.  This is because of the new steps that the IRS took to weed out fraudulent refund claims, many of which were processed very early, when electronic filing first opened up in January.  For the 2010 tax year/2011 filing season, the IRS identified 2.2 million fraudulent returns, including 940,000 involving identity theft, on which $6.5 billion in fraudulent refunds were claimed.  The IRS has been developing new processes and filters for returns, especially early filed returns, in an attempt to identify questionable refund claims.