Equally encouraging is a growing trend by taxpayers to submit their returns earlier. It took just eight weeks in Tax Season 2009 to reach 1 million submissions. By the same point in 2008 only 427 000 returns had been submitted. This year, the trend towards early filing continues and it just took 7 weeks to reach the 1million mark. Three months into Tax Season over 2.2 million returns was received compared to 1.8 million by this stage last year - a 22% increase.