I got a letter in the mail today from the IRS encouraging me to e-file my taxes. Although it would be easier to e-file, I have steadfastly refused to do this over the past few years because they charge for this service. Why should I pay to make their lives easier? (Surely it is a cost savings for them when people e-file.)

But wait! Myth number one about e-file, according to this letter, is that 96 million taxpayers are eligible to use this service for free. Wait again! What about the other 200 million?

This reminds me of the Ticketmaster “TicketFast” program, where they charge you $1.50 to print your tickets immediately, but don’t charge at all to mail them to you. How is it better for Ticketmaster to mail the tickets? They have to be printed out, put in an envelope and mailed. The other way, they don’t have to do anything.

Instead of trying to convince me to spend money to save them some, shouldn’t the government be improving their service? How about creating a TaxCut / TurboTax clone and putting it on the IRS site and allowing people to use it for free? I don’t know much about the IRS, but it seems like this would be the best way to get tax information in a standardized format that would really cut costs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under web UI, customer service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.