On January 11th, the IRS announced a program to redesign its communications with the public. Like a good government agency, it established a new office (with the simple moniker "Office of Taxpayer Correspondence") to oversee the redesign. The goal is to make its notices simple and effective.

The IRS has already released the first few notices it redesigned. The new notices have a lot more whitespace, more bold headings, and seem more sequential. However the few we looked at were several additional pages long!  "We want to make sure that taxpayers understand what they read in the simplest language possible," said the head of the new IRS office. We'll see how this goes.

For perspective: the IRS uses 1,000 different notices to correspond with taxpayers, and sends out 200 million annually. Yikes.

Related:

The original press release.

From the IRS YouTube Channel: Received a Letter from the IRS?

Note

Tax return season has started, and thus our postings to this blog will lessen. Be sure to get your stuff together and visit your tax preparer soon--we're all ready and waiting for you.