Professor Ventry Comments on Tax Policy for The Atlantic

Professor Dennis Ventry commented for The Atlantic on proposals to have the Internal Revenue Service provide taxpayers with pre-populated tax forms using information already provided to the IRS by employers, third-party reporting, and taxpayers themselves. While the idea has been vigorously opposed by companies that sell tax preparation software and some anti-tax activists, Professor Ventry maintains that the proposal is not nearly as controversial as the tax-prep industry wants everyone to believe.

"Pre-populating a return for these kinds of taxpayers that we're talking about, low- and middle-income taxpayers who take the standard deduction, who don't have mortgage interest or if they do they don't have enough itemized deductions to actually itemize, which is 70 percent of taxpayers, that is just scrivener's work," said Ventry. "It's not [a] sophisticated tax practice that requires paying a cent for. Taxpayers should not have to pay for that kind of work and the government is in the perfect position to actually go ahead and do that for the taxpayers."

Professor Ventry is an expert in tax policy and legal ethics. His research interests include tax expenditure analysis, family taxation, professional responsibility and standards of care, tax filing and administration, tax compliance, public finance, and tax and legal history. In addition, he was recently added as a co-author on the casebook, Federal Income Taxation with Paul McDaniel, Martin McMahon, Jr., and Daniel L. Simmons.

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