There were 136,528,000 returns filed as of April 22, an increase of 1.7 percent from 134,209,000 returns filed for the period through April 24, 2016.  Total returns processed hit 129,456,000, up .9 percent from the year earlier 128,317,000.

That compares to the prior week's report in which the 124,616,000 returns filed trailed 2015 by 5.8 percent and the 119,923,000 processed, which was 4.9 percent lower than the prior year. That means slightly more than 11.9 million returns were filed between the two weekly reports.

The biggest turnaround was in returns efiled by tax professionals. Those numbers had been behind last year's figures in all 11 weekly returns issued previously. But for the April 22 report, the tax pros contributed 70,864,000 efiled returns, an increase of .5 percent over 70,491,000.

Self-prepared efiled returns were ahead of 2015 in every weekly report except for the April tally when they fell behind last year by 5.3 percent, but as of April 22 that category had rebounded to 51,682,000 returns, an increase of 5.7 percent over 48,911,000 returns in last year's corresponding period.