7,000 at the IRS will lose their jobs as fewer filers use paper tax returns.

In Covington, Ky., a city of 40,000 just outside Cincinnati, times could be better. Median household income is just around $35,000. Twenty percent of the population doesn’t have health care. And 25 percent of residents live in poverty.

But Covington has at least one reliable industry: processing tax returns filed by individuals and businesses by paper. At an Internal Revenue Service facility there, 1,800 employees, including 700 seasonal workers, deal with the glut of dead trees the agency receives daily. They sort mail. They hunt for checks. They send incorrectly completed Affordable Care Act forms back to taxpayers. And they put the analog data they get into computers.

Until now. The IRS said it will eliminate more than 7,000 jobs related to the processing of paper tax returns by 2024 in a move that will reduce its workforce by more than 8 percent — and Covington is the first in the firing line.

Citing the growth of electronic tax return filing, the 84,000-person agency will eliminate the jobs in what it refers to as “submission processing” in Austin, Fresno, Calif., and Covington.

By 2019, 1,800 of 4,100 jobs in the Cincinnati region will be eliminated in Covington. By 2021, 3,000 jobs will be eliminated in Fresno. And by 2024, 2,400 jobs will be eliminated in Austin.

The IRS will consolidate submission processing work in Kansas City, Mo., and Ogden, Utah, saving $266 million by 2029.

The agency said it will not be folding up shop entirely, and that “submission processing employees have been able to transition into other positions” in the past. People in Covington, however, remain skeptical.

“They aren’t telling us anything,” said Ricky Riley, president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union. “When they announced this … we had people in the hallways crying.”