Although the 80% goal was not met by 2007, the IRS has inched closer and closer each year. The first report (IRS Publication 3415) was released on June 30, 1999, and it showed that 23% of returns (29 million out of 125 million) were e-filed. The RRA also required the IRS to report to Congress annually on its progress toward meeting the 80% e-filing goal. 6011(f) to authorize the IRS to "promote the benefits of and encourage the use of" e-filing. Besides strengthening the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the RRA set a goal to have 80% of all returns filed electronically by 2007. Shortly after the release of A Vision for a New IRS, Congress passed the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act (RRA) of 1998, P.L.
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The report sought to improve taxpayer service and transform the IRS into an agency that was "fair, efficient, and friendly." One of the stated goals was to increase the reliance on e-filing to reduce the error rate associated with the manual data entry of paper returns. Much of the progress seen today with e-filing can be traced back to the 1997 congressional report, A Vision for a New IRS, prepared by the National Commission on Restructuring the IRS. According to IRS Publication 6186, Calendar Year Return Projections for the United States and IRS Campuses 2016–2023, 128 million individual returns were electronically filed in 2015, 86% of all individual returns. Since the rollout, the number and percentage of e-filed returns have steadily increased over the years. In that year, 4.2 million tax returns were e-filed. The IRS continued to expand the pilot program until 1990 when e-filing was made available nationwide. When the transmission was complete, the tape would be transferred to a minicomputer where the data was readied for IRS processing. In the beginning, the program required the tax preparer to call an IRS number where an IRS employee would connect the phone to a special modem with a tape drive called a Mitron. Initially, e-filing was a pilot program in which five tax preparers who volunteered to participate e-filed 25,000 tax returns. Fact Sheet 2011-10 provides the history of e-filing, which began in 1986.
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(A software vendor told us that the 2016 Form 1040NR-EZ can be e-filed and that these returns have been accepted by the IRS however, without an official statement from the IRS, we have decided to focus exclusively on the 2016 Form 1040NR).īrief history of e-filing of income tax returnsĮ-filing was started by the IRS much earlier than many practitioners might remember. Further evidence of this somewhat surprising limitation is seen in the 2016 Form 1040NR-EZ instructions where the topic of electronic filing is conspicuously missing from the "What's New" section. However, according to the IRS website article " Modernized e-file (MeF) Overview," the 2016 Form 1040NR-EZ curiously must still be paper filed. This announcement was made in the "What's New" section of the 2016 Form 1040NR instructions. Nonresident Alien Income Tax Return, electronically. Nonresident filers have entered the digital age, and they can now file their 2016 Form 1040NR, U.S. citizens and residents have long been able to submit their tax returns electronically, nonresidents have been stuck in the Dark Ages by having to file their tax returns by mail.