The IRS is vowing to digitize all communications with taxpayer by 2025 for the 2024 tax year, Ars Technica reports.
Currently, the IRS relies on paper for much of its filing. While customers can file online, the IRS still processes these applications on paper. Uploading documents to a portal is also not currently possible, as the IRS still relies on Fax machines.
It has already made advances on web facing applications, such as verifying identities on mobile phones, and paying back taxes. By digitizing these tax returns, the IRS hopes to create a database and see how much American are paying in taxes.
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.
The IRS is a critical service for government, and is in desperate need of modernization to make tax filing easier for citizens. At the same time, its power has to be kept in check so it isn’t used for political prosecutions.
