Money, Government, and You
Computers in Libraries, Jun 2010 by West, Jessamyn
We’re now 6 weeks or so past tax time. Our library was very busy checking out tax books and holding free tax advice sessions with local trained volunteers. It’s a good time of year for the library. People pay their taxes and feel that they’ve gotten their taxes’ worth at their library.
I’m in the middle of doing a larger writing project about the digital divide and how libraries can help people with no to low tech skills keep up in a world that is rapidly advancing past them. Often when we talk about tech skills, they’re presented in a fairly value-neutral way. %u can decide to acquire them or not. It’s a personal decision. It’s not OK to require people to do something online that takes them outside of their comfort level when there’s an offline alternative. I’m going to make an argument against that. ITl also talk about some tips for next tax time and general online calculator widgets and money management sorts of things that will be useful year-round.
The Government and Your Money
I bring up taxes because tax paying is something that almost all adults need to do. We talk about food stamp programs or unemployment applications and how the government is shifting more of those interactions into the online space; we’re concerned about the impact of people’s lack of technology skills on their ability to access their government. The government has an incentive to provide usable services so that people can . . . use its services. There are also laws requiring government websites to be accessible to people with disabilities. Check out the Social Security Administration’s “list of services” page to see how attractive accessibility can be.
Unlike many social services programs, the IRS serves everyone. At my rural library a few years ago, we received a letter from the IRS saying it was discontinuing its delivery of paper tax forms. That created a problem for us. Back then, the library had a dialup internet connection shared among four computers. Downloading and printing tax forms or making photocopies from the binder was time-consuming and costly to our patrons or to us, depending on who was paying for paper. Finding tax forms on the IRS’s website was difficult, and PDF management was a whole new thing. Overall, tax time at the library was a technology FAIL. Bad for business, bad for morale. We’d like to have done better. We’ve been doing better.
The ERS would prefer that you file your taxes online. It saves the ERS money, in part by reducing errors, and saving the ERS money saves the country money. However, how does the ERS motivate people to do their taxes online when they may not even be online? This is a problem the ERS is investigating. In 2008, the IRS wrote up a 248-page study addressing this issue (linked in the resources section of this article). It charted people’s uptake of other technologies (see chart below), such as PC ownership and online banking participation, to try to find some patterns.
The IRS and E-File
In 1990, the IRS decided to try to start getting people to file their taxes online – at a time when less than 1% of people in the U.S. had internet access. The IRS is now working toward a goal set by Congress: 80% of individual tax forms filed electronically. This is causing them to look into many of the same topics that library organizations concerned with the digital divide have investigated. In 1990, 3.7% of all tax forms were filed electronically. In 2009, that number was 59.8%.
Most paper tax form processing on the IRS’s side happens automatically with only the problematic forms being touched by humans. The Plain Dealer of Cleveland wrote a recent article on the IRS’s shift to e-filing, explaining both the pros and cons of the plan and the sticky issues of making online tax preparation a genuine option for Americans. The article states: “It costs nearly $3 to process a paper return, but processing an electronic return costs only about 35 cents. The error rate on paper returns is 20 percent . . . compared with 1 percent for efiled returns.” Put another way: The U.S. saves several dollars per taxpayer when people file online.
Why do people still fill out paper returns? And how can we get them to stop? The IRS has studied this and lumped people into three categories:
* People with no access to a computer or ability to use a computer
* People who don’t want to spend the money to file online
* People who don’t want to put their personal information in cyberspace
The IRS is trying to manage the last two categories through incentive plans such as free online tax filing and public awareness campaigns about the security of e-filed returns, stating that it’s “never had a security breach affecting e-filed returns.” The first category? That’s where the digital divide happens. And where libraries can help.
Genuine Options for All Taxpayers
So taxes have been filed for this year for most people
how to make money online
Posted on September 7th 2010 in
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