Can I Download Tax Forms from R & G Brenner’s Website?

Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is actively encouraging everyone to file their taxes electronically. In part this is because it makes the entire process much faster and easier of the IRS to process all of the returns. Another benefit is that it cuts down on errors because most electronic tax forms include simple calculators that ensure that the math is completed properly and warnings that ensure that all of the required lines are properly filled out before the form is filed. Finally, filing electronically means less cost, but financially and ecologically since it takes much less paper and postage.

As a consequence of this trend, most IRS offices provide an ever shrinking number of paper forms. While anyone can contact the IRS directly to receive free copies of most forms, this is a time consuming process as the forms have to be mailed to the taxpayer and then the taxpayer has to mail them back to the IRS. Therefore, the IRS has gone to considerable trouble to make most of the more commonly used tax forms accessible electronically. Even forms that have to be submitted in paper format – like Form 5405 to claim the home buyer tax credit – can be found on, and downloaded from, the IRS website (www.irs.gov).

As a service to its clients, R&G Brenner provides a direct link to the IRS directory of forms online on its website, www.rgbrenner.com. One of the tricky problems with downloading forms from the Internet is that almost every year there are small changes made to even the most common of tax forms in order to accommodate annual changes or one time tax opportunities that only apply for that particular year. Therefore it is important that taxpayers download the right version of the form for the relevant year. For this reason, it makes much more sense to provide a link directly to the regularly updated directory of forms provided by the IRS as opposed to manually post up versions of all of the relevant forms on the R&G Brenner website itself.

Beyond this link to the IRS website and the directory of federal tax forms available for download, the R&G Brenner website also provides a link to the Federation of Tax Administrators (FTA) website – www.taxadmin.org – that offers a listing of the fifty individual states along with a series of links to obtain tax forms offered by the separate state governments. Since the FTA has already set up a comprehensive online directory that makes access to each of the state’s tax authorities very easy, it only makes sense for R&G Brenner to provide a link to this resource as opposed to “reinventing the wheel” and making a new directory just for their website.

Finding the right tax forms and getting copies of them all before the filing deadline has always been a challenge, but the rise of downloadable forms from the Internet should make this much easier in the future. Not all forms are available yet and some forms require a paper filing, nevertheless it only makes sense to download these forms as opposed to waiting for them to arrive in the mail after requesting them. R&G Brenner understands this, which is why they provide these resources on their website. Further, R&G Brenner clients can always talk to their tax preparer in order to discover which forms they need and to see how these forms should be filed.

Have a tax question? Ask one of our tax professionals.