LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — If you feel compelled to prepare your own tax return, it’s good to know there are many tools to help get the job done. And this year there are lots of ways to prepare your own tax return for free, some of which you can take advantage of no matter how high your income.
The newest addition to the free filing arena is IRS’s own FFFF — Free File Fillable Forms service. This is a separate service from the Free Filing Alliance. FFFF is perfect for people who like to prepare their own tax returns on paper. It’s really nifty if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, stay away! You can log in at this Web site: https://www.freefilefillableforms.com.
The service has plenty of advantages:
- There is no limit to the income you can report, using these forms
- You can enter data, save it, and come back to it later to add more data
- Lots of forms are available as part of this package, including rental income, business income, capital gains, farming income, employee business expenses, a variety of credits, and more
- You can produce your estimated tax vouchers — but can’t transmit payment from the system
- There is a button to do the math on a given form, so you don’t have to
- You can get your refund directly deposited to your bank account
- If you owe back taxes, child support, etc. you will be notified about monies to be withheld from your refund — and why
- You can transmit your completed return directly to IRS and get proof of filing or print it out and mail it in
The bad news?