this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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IRS vows to digitize all taxpayer documents by 2025 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
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IRS vows to digitize all taxpayer documents by 2025::All documents will be digitized as soon as they arrive at the IRS.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Today, the US Treasury Department announced that taxpayers will have the choice to go paperless for all Internal Revenue Service (IRS) correspondence in the upcoming 2024 filing season.

By accelerating paperless processing, the IRS expects to simplify how Americans access their taxpayer data and save millions historically spent on storing more than a billion documents.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that updating the IRS technology was crucial to reduce the tax gap and ensure that "high earners play by the same rules as working and middle-class families."

Ars reached out to several organizations representing tax professionals and accountants to see how the IRS going paperless would impact individuals and corporations during the next filing season and will update this report as more information becomes available.

Last month, Congress said that H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer could be fined billions for "recklessly" sharing potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayers' sensitive personal and financial data with Google and Meta "for years" in apparent violation of laws.

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[–] DigitalWebSlinger 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For anyone wondering how this will "make high earners play by the same rules":

Seemingly not everyone will be stoked to see the IRS go totally paperless. The Treasury Department said that combining paperless processing with "an improved data platform" will make it easier for data scientists to extract and analyze data—potentially detecting tax evasion that the IRS has long overlooked due to a lack of resources.

"When combined with an improved data platform, digitization and data extraction will enable data scientists to implement advanced analytics and pattern recognition methods to pursue cases that can help address the tax gap, including wealthy individuals and large corporations using complex structures to evade taxes they owe," the Treasury Department said.

In April, the Treasury Department said that "improving enforcement among high-income and high-wealth individuals, complex partnerships, and large corporations that are not paying the taxes they owe" could end up flagging $160 billion owed but evaded annually.

"Due to a lack of resources and loss of top talent, audits of the wealthy and large corporations have plummeted over the last decade, and the amount of taxes evaded by the top 1 percent has exploded to $160 billion per year," the Treasury Department reported in April. "Audit rates for millionaires fell by 77 percent, audit rates for large corporations fell by 44 percent, and audit rates for partnerships fell by 80 percent between 2010 and 2017."

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that updating the IRS technology was crucial to reduce the tax gap and ensure that "high earners play by the same rules as working and middle-class families."

Anyone taking bets on Congress shutting this down?

[–] LetMeEatCake 5 points 1 year ago

This is a direct result of congress intentionally giving greater funding to the IRS with the explicit goal of increasing revenue by decreasing tax evasion by the wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

The chances of congress shutting it down comes down to if republicans gain control over government in next year's elections.