A group of Congress members, including U.S. Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Katie Porter (D-CA), are urging the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to create a free, direct e-file tool for taxpayers.
This comes in advance of a May 16 report by the IRS on that very topic.
“The IRS established the free e-filing program in 2003 but it did so in partnership with major tax preparation software companies that frequently mislead taxpayers into paying for their services,” Sherman said. “For simple tax returns, the IRS should make it quick and easy to file taxes – and file them directly with the IRS itself, which already has all your income data. I look forward to the IRS’s report on e-filing and encourage the IRS to take steps toward establishing a free direct e-filing option in order to improve the efficiency of our tax system and increase access to critical social programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC).”
Section 10301 of the Inflation Reduction Act required the IRS to establish a taskforce to draft a report within 9 months on the subject. The report must include an assessment of the costs of free direct e-filing; a survey of taxpayers’ support for free direct e-filing; and a third-party evaluation on the feasibility of the IRS implementing a direct free e-filing system.
In a letter to the IRS, the lawmakers urge the IRS to endorse the development of a direct file tool to increase efficiency in the tax system, decrease costs to the American taxpayers for filing their taxes, and increase access to vital tax credits like the EITC and CTC.
“It should be easy and free for Americans to file their taxes,” Porter said. “Instead, taxpayers are collectively cheated out of billions of hours and dollars each year, because corporate special interests spend millions lobbying to keep the tax system complicated. The IRS can finally put taxpayers before big corporations – they should do so.”
U.S. Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made a similar request to the IRS back in April.
“The problems caused by complicated tax filing – namely the cost, lost time and added worry for filers – can be solved by the IRS creating a direct file tool,” Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said. “It’s far past time to provide a public option for tax filing instead of having so many taxpayers rely on corporations that have tricked low-income filers into paying when they should have been filing for free or provided sensitive data to outside parties.”