File Your Taxes And Save A Tree

For the past few years, taxpayers have been tinkering with electronic filing. Last tax season, about 900,000 folks did their own returns on a personal computer and sent them directly to the Internal Revenue Service electronically. But that was less than 1% of the 100 million-plus individual returns the feds received.

This tax year, the IRS has begun a full-blown push aimed at eventually getting nearly everyone to file paperless returns. If the system works as advertised, the advantages are obvious: no botched arithmetic, no scrambling to find that one missing form, no wild ride to the post office at 11:59 on Apr. 15, none of those nasty IRS missives raising a fuss about that $5,000 deduction that somehow became $50,000.