How would you like to have this problem with your genealogy records?

As Americans prepare to file their 2023 federal tax returns, the Internal Revenue Service is getting ready to take on one of its biggest challenges: Digitizing all of its paper.

Even though the vast majority of people file their federal tax returns electronically, the IRS still receives millions of paper tax returns a year, along with other kinds of forms and correspondence sent via snail mail.

All told, there are more than 1 billion historical paper documents stored at IRS campuses across the country, and there will soon be more paper coming in with the start of the 2024 tax filing season Monday. Last year, the tax agency received more than 26 million individual and business returns filed on paper.

“I call it the mythical land of files,” one IRS official working on the paperless initiative told CNN.

One of the problems is that the IRS has not had the technology to digitize a paper tax return or form. Instead, an IRS employee manually enters each digit from the form into the agency’s system – a process that resulted in transcription errors on about 22% of paper returns in 2021.

The process takes time and resources – all of which could mean taxpayers are waiting longer for their federal tax refund.

“This doesn’t just seem crazy. It is crazy,” wrote Erin M. Collins, the National Taxpayer Advocate, nearly two years ago. She has often referred to paper as the “IRS’s Kryptonite.”

You can read more in an article by Katie Lobosco published in the CNN web site at: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/tax-season-irs-digitizing-paper/index.html.