In a new IRS Fact Sheet (FS-2023-18, 8/8/23), the IRS has announced that it is close to going paperless.

The IRS still receives about 76 million paper tax returns and forms and 125 million pieces of correspondence, notice responses and non-tax forms each year. It also has more than one billion historical documents, which costs $40 million per year to store.

Thanks to Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) resources, the agency has made significant strides adopting new technology for scanning paper returns. As part of the next phase, it is launching an ambitious plan to ensure that taxpayers will be able to go paperless by the 2024 tax filing season. By 2025, the IRS expects to achieve paperless processing that digitizes all paper-filed returns when received.

We will continue to monitor new developments.