Coming soon: The IRS will do your taxes for you Matt LewisDaily CallerWednesday, September 7, 2011
Imagine this scenario: The IRS may soon just do your taxes for you — and
send you the bill.
If this sounds farfetched, it’s not.
With a new congressional “super committee” tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts by November, creative ways to find additional revenue are in high demand. And allowing the IRS to prepare you taxes could be one solution.
The idea has been around for a while, but has been picking up steam in recent years. In 2006, Senate
Finance Committee Chairman
Max Baucus (D-Mont.) argued it would close a $345 billion annual difference between what the government believes taxpayers owe them and what the IRS actually collects, which he calls the “tax gap.”
“I think the solution [to the tax gap problem] is to get rid of the middle-man and no fees required,”
he said.
Obama’s former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
Austan Goolsbee made a strong case for it in a 2006
New York Times op-ed, explaining, “… the
revenue service could send you a tax form already filled out with the information it has for you — a Simple Return — rather than a blank tax form. You would simply check the numbers against your W-2 and 1099 and then sign it.”
But this isn’t just an idea floated by senators and presidential advisers. While running for president, then-Sen.
Barack Obama touted it
during a 2007 speech at the Tax Policy Institute: “The government already collects wage and
bank account information,” he said, “so there’s no reason the IRS can’t send Americans pre-filled tax forms to verify.”
While the notion of allowing government to encroach on yet another aspect of our lives might sound like a hard sell, members of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (
CCIA) believe this is a very real threat.
Full article here 
Wed Sep 07, 2011 7:56 pm