Tax Return Digitization Legislation Gets House Panel Approval

The House committee with jurisdiction over the IRS advanced a bill Wednesday that seeks to streamline processing of electronically prepared tax returns that are submitted on paper.

The House Ways and Means Committee voted 42-0 in favor of the bill (H.R. 6956) from Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), which would require the IRS to add a barcode to printed returns that can be scanned and converted into an electronic format.

The tax collection agency would also need to use optical character recognition technology to review returns filled out by hand that couldn’t be digitized otherwise.

Manually transcribing paper returns is “grossly ...