I recently got a postcard from the IRS, telling me that in January I will not be getting the usual mailing of paper tax forms.  Instead I'll have to either file electronically or go to the website to get them.  They are doing this to reduce costs.

From what I can see on the web, they say that the majority of filers do it either electronically now or have paid preparers do it for them.

I wonder why the IRS could not simply mail the forms to the people who still use paper?

I am suspecting that come January there's gonna be a disaster as seniors and computer-unsavvy people end up in the lurch.

Thoughts? ???

I think they were already doing that, I haven't gotten anything from the IRS in ages.  I pay to do mine because frankly I need to file a 40 page return thanks to all the crap I do.

Plus aren't they usually available in huge stacks at post offices and libraries too?  I can't imagine it's a huge part of their budget to track the stuff and send it to people, but I imagine it still costs money.

I wonder why the IRS could not simply mail the forms to the people who still use paper?


Because there's no way for the IRS to know which of the thousands of forms on the website the taxpayer actually needs.  So you go to the website, print off dozens of PDFs, and when you find a worksheet (which isn't even a form, it's often buried in the instructions for a form!), you fill it out and keep going until you're done.

I pay someone to do it with a glorified version of the same software I could buy for $29.99 every year, but just for spite, I file by submitting the entire fracking PDF - which is usually about half a dozen forms, a couple of attachments, and the same forms printed with AMT numbers - on paper. 

You wanna get mad about something?  Get mad about the fact that you have to pay either an accountant or a tax software company for software to do it, or you'll spend at least 10-20 hours a year filling out forms.

Any tax code that isn't simple enough to be filled out in less than an hour, by one person, stuck in a locked room and equipped with nothing more than a pencil and a four-function calculator, is unjust.  We can gripe about rates later.  But unless you're a tax lawyer, a CPA, or a Congressman paid by a lobbyist to squeeze in Just One More Provision, can we at least agree that the complexity of the US tax code benefits absolutely nobody?  Burn it all down and start over.

Try getting somebody from the IRS on the phone!  By the time you get through, you're so frazzled and confused, you don't even remember what you wanted to ask them!

http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/07/nut.gif

Try getting somebody from the IRS on the phone!  By the time you get through, you're so frazzled and confused, you don't even remember what you wanted to ask them! http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/07/nut.gif


That's OK.  Even if you asked the right question to the IRS drone, there's a 41% chance that the IRS will give you the wrong answer.  But you're still on the hook for the penalties if you take their advice and it turns out they screwed up.

Which is why you pay an accountant a few hundred bucks a year, because unlike the people at the IRS, he's actually motivated to get it right.