IRS sitting on your tax refund? There's a bright spot.

Taxpayers awaiting refunds from Uncle Sam may find some solace in knowing they'll earn 4% interest on payments from the Internal Revenue Service that are behind 45 days or more. That's more than double what savings accounts and money market funds currently fetch.

The IRS began this year's tax filing season with a backlog of 8 million individual and business returns from the previous year. As of late April, the agency had a total of more than 15 million unprocessed individual returns from the last tax year and 2020.

Americans may well have scrambled to file their returns by the April 18 deadline, after two years in which the IRS extended the tax-filing deadline because of the COVID-19 pandemic.