If
you’ll pardon a deliberate pun, the early returns from this year’s filing
season are not good.
Scattered
software glitches coupled with the inevitable 11th hour changes in
the IRC left many practitioners using language usually reserved for a bachelor
party of longshoremen. I wish I could put a nickel in my retirement savings for
every preparer that swore that they had just worked their last tax season.
But
wait, it promises to get even better.
NOT!
A
pair of Congressmen from the Land of Lincoln have introduced legislation that
would allow the IRS to provide to taxpayers a tax form that already contains
pertinent filing information received from employers and financial institutions
to help, ahem, streamline the often arduous tax-prep process.
Stop
me if you’ve heard this one before.
I
believe former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards proposed something
similar about five years ago – this of course was before his serial
philandering and $400 haircuts helped vault the National Enquirer into
consideration for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
Rep. Bill Foster and Mike Quigley, D-Ill., introduced
the Autofill Act of 2013 last week in the hopes of simplifying the process of
filling out federal income tax forms saving the taxpayers both time and money.
All told taxpayers spend roughly 6 billion hours a year in complying with the
Tax Code and pay out an average of more than $200 on preparation fees.
The legislation would create a voluntary tax filing
program that would allow individuals to log in to a secure IRS Web site and
download a tax form automatically populated with taxpayer information. It’s
estimated that it will save roughly $2 billion a year in preparation fees. For
those keeping score at home, a similar program is already in place in
California.
Hmm. Tax-prep companies such as H&R Block and
Liberty Tax Service shouldn’t be too upset at the prospect of potentially
losing billions in revenue. Ditto for the AICPA and its preparer membership.
But it’s not only the loss of revenue for the
preparer community that’s about three area codes beyond troublesome.
The IRS has trouble policing the system now. Currently,
there are about 650,000 taxpayers who are victims of ID theft via false IRS
returns, what would make anyone believe this system would be any more secure
than its current one? Or more accurate?
This proposal is tailor-made for an opening
monologue by the likes of Leno, Letterman, O’Brian and Stewart.
Experience tells me this legislation
won’t make it very far. But absent that, if you determine that this was your
last tax season and want to get out, then here’s where I have a proposal for
you.
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