For the 2024 tax season, the US IRS will allow digital submissions of all tax documents

The Treasury Department announced on Wednesday that the Internal Revenue Service of the United States intends to allow taxpayers to submit all paperwork and contact to the organization digitally beginning with the 2024 tax filing season and to transform all paper tax returns into digital files by the 2025 filing period.

The project would enable taxpayers to electronically submit all communications, non-tax forms, and responses to IRS notices as part of a ten-year, $60 billion campaign to modernize processes and enhance tax enforcement, according to the Treasury.

The initiative might remove handling of up to 125 million such documents each year, as many of these forms are currently only submitable on paper by mail.

The majority of tax returns in the US are already filed electronically, which speeds up refund processing. However, the COVID-19 epidemic, along with related filing delays and manpower problems, left the IRS by February 2022 with a sizable backlog of 22.5 million unprocessed paper tax returns that required some sort of manual processing.

With the use of new scanning equipment, the agency has been churning through the backlog, bringing the number of returns that still need to be processed, reviewed, or corrected down to 2.15 million.

Taxpayers will always have the option to file paperwork on paper, according to excerpts of remarks made by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at an IRS facility in McLean, Virginia.

For those taxpayers, the IRS is pledging to digitally process all paper correspondence, non-tax forms, and notification answers by filing season 2025, as well as 100 percent of paper tax and information returns that are submitted via paper.

The money provided in last year’s climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act, which was initially approved at $80 billion over a decade, was reduced to $60 billion by this year’s bipartisan agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. The new scanning technology and other improvements in IRS customer service were made possible by this funding.

These funds are distinct from the IRS’s annual operating budget, which some Republicans in Congress have pledged to slash. Yellen stated that “stable and sufficient annual appropriations” for the IRS were required to maintain progress on programs to enhance customer service, including the endeavor to process paperwork digitally and speed up call response times.