I was thinking that it would be helpful to provide a calendar of important upcoming dates for taxpayers so they can mark their own calendars and plan accordingly.

I’ve got this one on my web site, which counts down to the
April 15 tax filing deadline.

But I wanted to provide you with a fuller list of dates.

I googled “2009 tax dates” and found this link showing tax filing deadlines on irs.gov, which seemed promising. Until I clicked it. Not very helpful at all to determine when one must file income tax returns.

This is typical of the IRS: There is the obvious, basic questions that people want to know. And those obvious, basic questions should have obvious, basic answers that are quick and easy to find. With just one or two clicks from the site.

But why should the IRS do anything the easy way? Why spend $1 of taxpayer’s money to create a simple set of tax rules accessible from an easy to find site when you can spend $100 of taxpayer’s money to do the same thing???

And so, when we look for “2009 dates” or “2009 deadlines” or “2009 tax dates” (etc.) we get a whole bunch of useless information.

Note to IRS: Post the filing dates on your home page… or at least a link to open a tax calendar. It’s not difficult to do. (Heck, a high school student with a list of dates could probably do it in an evening with Google Calendar).

Now, I realize that April 15 is THE DAY. It’s the day that is burned on most people’s psyche as the darkest day of the year. But there are other important filing dates and tax deadlines throughout the year that need to be adhered to.

If you want to mark your calendars with relevant tax-related dates, this calendar from MSNMoney is a lot better.

Here’s another tip that the IRS will ignore: They should allow syncing options with Blackberries and personal online calendars so that we can click a button on the IRS site and download the filing dates to our calendars… perhaps even with helpful reminders built in to remind us in the weeks leading up to a tax deadline. The technology is there, the federal government needs to implement it.

Tags: Income Tax, income tax filing, irs filing date, tax calendar, tax deadlines, tax payments

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under IRS, Tax Collection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.