Next tax season will involve a lot less paper, both for taxpayers and for ❀the IRS, which has launched an effort to rid itself of the hundreds of millions of pieces of physical f💯orms and correspondence it receives every year.

Starting in the 2024 tax season, taxpayers will be able to digitally submit all correspondence, non-tax forms, and responses to notices—many of which still require physical paperwork, the IRS said Wednesday. That includes many things taxpayers may have to do outside their normal income tax forms, such as verifying documents. Taxpayers will still be able to file tax returns and other forms on paper if they want to.

“The amount of papers still being used inside the IRS often feels more like the 1970s and the 1980s than the 21st century,” IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel said in a speech in McLean, Virginia. “You all saw the photos of the IRS cafeteria in our Austin campus with racks and racks of paper absolutely filling a room not normally used for storage. Tens of millions of pieces of paper that require manual processing flood our campuses and offices. It's time to ensure that no cafeteria in the IRS ever looks like that again.”

The IRS estimates its digital upgrades will eliminate 200 million pieces of paper each year. The anti-paperwork initiative is part of a modernization drive 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:funded by the Inflation Red🍌uct🐎ion Act of 2022, which increased the tax agency’s funding by $80 billion over 10 years.

Congress approved the extra funding after the agency was almost literally buried in paperwork after the pandemic disrupted its normal operations. The IRS began 2022 with a backlog of 4.ღ7 million individual tax returns and millions more business returns and has managed to 🥃catch up on all the error-free returns. 

In general, dealing with paper is more expensive and less efficient than working digitally, so much so that Erin Collins, the agency’s taxpayer advocate, has referred to paperwork as the IRS’s “Kryptonite.” 

In addition to accepting forms digitally, the IRS plans to digitally scan all incoming forms by 2025, eliminating the need for employees to punchജ data in one keystroke at a time. 𝓰