TAP A04-040

EITC Preparers’ Electronic Toolkit

Statement of Issue:

The EITC Committee was asked by the EITC program to review and suggest changes to “Earned Income Tax Credit: An Electronic Toolkit for Tax Preparers,” an online source of basic information about the EITC designed and maintained by a private vendor and accessible via a link on the IRS website.

Proposal:

The Committee wrote 17 pages of specific comments on how to implement the following recommendations:

• Provide information on direct access to the Electronic Toolkit in publications and forms.
• Add guidance to ease navigation of the site.
• Eliminate empty space so that users do not have to sort through several screens or pieces of paper to get to the substance of the topic.
• Reformat online and printed versions to improve readability.
• Whenever forms, schedules, and publications are mentioned, provide web addresses and links that take the user directly to the cited material, not the IRS website home page.
• Employ a more sophisticated and user-friendly search engine that would identify more potentially relevant documents.
• Provide clearer and more complete explanations