Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reform was designed to make the system more straightforward by eliminating most shelters and reducing the number of tax brackets from 14 to five for the 1987 tax year. For many of the 107 million U.S. taxpayers, reform has been a blessing. At least 2 million low-income citizens are no longer required to file at all. Moreover, the creation of a standard deduction and the raising of thresholds for medical expenses and other write-offs means that about 25% of the estimated 40 million taxpayers who itemize will be better off if they use the short forms instead...
...people than usual scurrying for tax help. Ordinarily, about 40% of all taxpayers require professional assistance. This year that figure is expected to reach 60%. Says Jack Brownrigg, an accountant in Honolulu: "I'm getting a flood of calls from people I never heard from before." Proponents of tax reform contend that the confusion will recede as taxpayers learn the new rules. "We are in the transition part," says Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington lobbying group. "The system will get simpler as things like consumer-interest deductions are phased...
...time. The IRS was determined to do better this year, since it expects to help 22 million callers on its toll-free phone lines this season, up from 17 million in 1987. The agency, which has invested 2.5 million hours in training its entire staff for tax reform, has increased its ranks of telephone assisters by 1,000, to 4,500. To determine whether correct information is going out, the IRS is making 20,000 anonymous calls in which common tax problems are posed to its assisters. So far the results are disappointing. After 5,000 calls, the error rate...
...terms of processing returns, ironically, the IRS seems to be plowing resolutely through reform's storm. "So far, the filing season is one of the best that we have ever had," says Lawrence Gibbs, the IRS commissioner. By early March 36.7 million returns had been filed, only 2.4% fewer than at the same time last year. The IRS is processing them at about the same rate as last year and mailing refunds, which average $801, up from $755 last year, in the usual three to four weeks after the filing. Perhaps most surprising is the decline in cheating. Gibbs believes...
...states of Eastern Europe. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Communist authorities last week moved to stamp out separate shows of popular defiance. Though these outbreaks involved political rather than ethnic grievances, both forms of unrest may have been prompted in part by the spirit of political openness and reform that Gorbachev has promoted...