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In 2013, I reported my 2012 tax using www.freefilefillableforms.com, promoted by IRS.

This year for 2013 tax report, I noticed that IRS says to use Free File Fillable Form when Income is above $58,000 (see http://www.irs.gov/uac/Free-File:-Do-Your-Federal-Taxes-for-Free). Otherwise, there are other online ways to report tax for free.

I didn't see that I can't use Free File Fillable Form when my income is below $58,000 at http://www.irs.gov/uac/Free-File-Fillable-Form-Constraints. Or did I miss something?

2 Answers 2

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You can, but for incomes less than $58K you can also use free versions of tax return preparation software. I'm guessing IRS assumed that people would prefer to use software if they can, rather than raw forms. I would assume the same.

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  • Sorry, session link, didn't notice... Now linked the landing page.
    – littleadv
    Commented Apr 20, 2014 at 19:10
  • FFFF is great if you like to do your taxes by hand. There's no middleman software to get in the way. Two problems are: (1) it doesn't seem to work reliably on all browsers and operating systems, (2) FFFF immediately rounds off all inputs to the nearest dollar, rather than waiting until the end of a chain of calculations (as the IRS instructs). On several occasions I've therefore had to add a line to, say, my 1040B like FreeFileFillableForms Rounding Error -$1.
    – dg99
    Commented Apr 21, 2014 at 22:48
  • what do you like to use then? @dg99
    – Tim
    Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 1:08
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    I feel IRS doesn't know how to clearly write instructions. This one is an example. The cpaital gain distribution one is another. Which explains why I sometimes can't read their instructions.
    – Tim
    Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 1:13
  • @Tim I use FFFF. It's the only free electronic filing tool I've found.
    – dg99
    Commented Apr 22, 2014 at 14:41
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You are correct. If they would write in plain user friendly language, taxpayers would understand the problem. If you think this is bad, try looking at the Internal Revenue Manual Section 21 that the IRS employees on the Customer Service Line have to use to answer your questions when you call. Also the other issue is the IRS Computer System is from the 1960's and uses codes. The employees are not looking at modern day user friendly computer screens.

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