Changes may finally ease taxing situation

Today is Tax Day, three days later than usual due to a Washington, D.C., holiday. Last year, about 142 million individuals filed tax returns. But President Barack Obama thinks 90 percent of those taxpayers shouldn’t have to file.

Meanwhile, the IRS wants to make sure you know it is tech-savvy. This year it introduced the IRS2Go smart phone ap. And the nation’s tax collectors even tweet, providing up-to-date tax news.

Tax Day used to be a day—and night–of long lines at the Post Office. But last year, more than 70 percent of returns were filed electronically. Now Obama says the yearly ritual should be eliminated for most taxpayers.

“Most people don’t itemize, if you don’t itemize, sending in some complicated return is just a waste of paperwork,” he said. “And even if you do itemize, for most of you, it’s your mortgage or your house interest payments on your mortgage, a couple other things. It shouldn’t be some two-week ordeal.”

Obama says the process should be a simple matter of checking to make sure the IRS has the correct information, and signing a form electronically.

Simplifying the tax system has been proposed before, but those efforts have not changed the complicated procedure. The tax code now takes up more than 70,000 pages.