Filing taxes online shouldn’t be this hard
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
Ah, Tax Day — a time when our relationship with the United States government can get a little strained, in part because the U.S. system for filing taxes can feel pretty antiquated. But now the Internal Revenue Service has a plan to improve that, thanks to an additional $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act that the agency will receive over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel about what those IRS technology improvements might look like. Kiel said some of the most effective tech upgrades would be relatively easy to implement.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about |
| 0:04.6 | money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based |
| 0:11.0 | program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry. |
| 0:15.9 | Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your |
| 0:20.7 | podcasts. The IRS has a plan to modernize its technical systems, finally. From American |
| 0:29.0 | Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Korino. |
| 0:42.4 | A tax day, a time when our relationship with the government can get a little strained. In part, |
| 0:49.2 | because our systems for filing taxes can feel pretty antiquated. But the Internal Revenue Service |
| 0:56.4 | has a plan to improve that. Thanks to an additional $80 billion, the agency will get over the next |
| 1:02.6 | decade from the Inflation Reduction Act. And it turns out some of the most effective tech upgrades |
| 1:08.8 | would be relatively easy to put in place. According to Paul Keel, a reporter at ProPublica |
| 1:15.0 | who's written a lot about the IRS. There's a lot of information that the IRS has that could make |
| 1:20.2 | filing taxes much easier for people. So for instance, I'm referred to W2s. That shows what |
| 1:26.5 | your wages are. There's all sorts of other forms like that that may come from, for instance, |
| 1:31.1 | your bank showing how much interest income you got from your savings account. Those forms go to |
| 1:35.9 | the IRS because it's supposed to help them administer taxes to make sure that people are not just |
| 1:41.2 | omitting income that they should be included. But that information could also help taxpayers when |
| 1:45.8 | they're filing. Imagine a world where you go to file taxes and all this information just |
| 1:50.9 | automatically put in to some sort of system that's filing your taxes online. And that is a goal |
| 1:57.0 | that the IRS has. It's something that should have been done years ago because on the scale of tech |
| 2:03.1 | challenges, this is not Mount Everest. This is something that was doable a long time ago. |
| 2:08.8 | Historically, the IRS has had this public-private partnership to offer software for free filing. |
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