Tax professionals have been a hot topic this filing season.
The bulk of the coverage has come from the federal court rulings that effectively ended the Internal Revenue Service's nascent attempt to regulate tax preparers.
Now comes news from the IRS itself that more of us are doing our taxes on our own.
At least that's what the tax data through March 7 shows.
After five full weeks of tax filing, more than 27 million individual returns were e-filed by taxpayers who self-prepared their 1040s. That's an increase of almost 6 percent over this time last year.
Fewer using tax pros, so far: Meanwhile, IRS statistics through early March show that the number of folks who hired a tax pro to do their returns fell.
Slightly more than 34.8 million e-filed tax returns were submitted by tax pros. That's 2.2 percent fewer than the number of returns filed electronically by tax preparers at the same point last filing season.
Of course, one reason that more folks are filing their returns on their own is that their taxes aren't very complicated. In these cases, as I noted when I spoke to MainStreet.com about tax filing options, tax return self-prep usually is a good and economical choice.
So people turn to their own computers to fill out their forms and get their returns done quickly and generally early in the filing season.
Taxpayers who have more convoluted financial and tax lives, however, tend to put off their filing tasks until later in the filing season. And they also are more likely to get personal help in filling out their more numerous and complicated tax forms.
So there's hope, tax professionals, that your IRS numbers could at least catch up with the prior year's filing data.
Below are the numbers from the IRS comparing cumulative filing statistics through March 8, 2013, and March 7, 2014.
|
Individual Income Tax Returns: |
2013 |
2014 |
% Change |
||
|
Total Receipts |
67,143,000 |
67,183,000 |
0.1 |
||
|
Total Processed |
60,944,000 |
65,662,000 |
7.7 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
E-filing Receipts: |
|
|
|
||
|
TOTAL |
61,488,000 |
62,213,000 |
1.2 |
||
|
Tax Professionals |
35,585,000 |
34,816,000 |
-2.2 |
||
|
Self-prepared |
25,903,000 |
27,397,000 |
5.8 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Web Usage: |
|
|
|
||
|
Visits to IRS.gov |
197,651,780 |
181,196,235 |
-8.3 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Total Refunds: |
|
|
|
||
|
Number |
53,447,000 |
55,434,000 |
3.7 |
||
|
Amount |
$154.696 |
Billion |
$164.586 |
Billion |
6.4 |
|
Average refund |
$2,894 |
$2,969 |
2.6 |
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Direct Deposit Refunds: |
|
|
|
||
|
Number |
47,177,000 |
47,976,000 |
1.7 |
||
|
Amount |
$142.861 |
Billion |
$146.305 |
Billion |
2.4 |
|
Average refund |
$3,028 |
$3,050 |
0.7 |
||
Have you filed your 2013 tax return yet? Did you do it yourself electronically?
Will you file on your own when you finally get around to doing your taxes?
Or will you hire a tax professional?
You also might find these items of interest:
