Ivanka Trump wrong on postcard tax filing

Bill’s provisions won’t take effect for 2018 filing season.

During an interview on “Fox & Friends” in which she touted the recently passed tax bill, Ivanka Trump said voters would benefit more quickly than they might have imagined: this April. And she said most would be filing their taxes on “a single postcard.”

There are two problems with what Trump said. We’ll take them in order.

The bill’s provisions won’t be taking effect in time for the April In April, “the vast majority will be (filling out their taxes) on a single postcard.”

— Ivanka Trump on Dec. 21 in an interview on “Fox & Friends”

2018 filing season. Nothing in the tax bill would take effect soon enough to change taxpayers’ filing choices in any significant way by April 2018. The bill’s provisions only address tax year 2018 and beyond. So in April, taxpayers will be filing their paperwork for tax year 2017 to the IRS under exist-

ing tax law, not the new law.

There isn’t a postcard filing option today, and nothing in the bill would create one.

The idea didn’t come from nowhere. In November, House Republicans touted their plan as one that could be accommodated by a postcard-size form. The president liked the idea so much that he held one up and kissed it for the cameras when meeting with lawmakers at the White House.

“It’s going to make life very simple,” he said on Nov. 2. The only people that aren’t going to like this is H&R Block. They’re not going to be very happy. That’s probably one of the only companies in the country that’s not going to be thrilled.”

But in the end, the bill didn’t do much to make this idea a reality.

Creating a postcard option “is most likely one of many things the IRS will have to figure out and issue new regulations on,” said Patrick Newton, a spokesman for the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. But that’s not happening immediately, he said.

Newton said that there is already a pretty easy way to file your tax returns, the 1040EZ form. “While it’s not postcard-sized, it’s pretty simple, and whatever they end up with in the future will probably look a lot like that currently does,” Newton said.

IRS statistics for the 2015 tax year show 23.3 million tax filers used the 1040EZ. That’s about one of every six filers.

Could the number of people using the 1040EZ increase (albeit in 2019) due to the tax bill’s passage?

Joseph Rosenberg, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, said the number might increase a little due to the standard deduction increase, which would save some taxpayers from itemizing — something they would have to do on the longer full 1040 form.

Still, he added, “there are relatively few people who currently itemize who have a simple enough situation” to shift to the 1040EZ.

When we contacted the White House, they referred us to a tweet Ivanka Trump sent a few hours after her “Fox & Friends” interview.

It followed a tweet from a Democratic political scientist who noted that taxes for 2017 will be filed based on current law. Trump replied, “Correct! All across America people will be thinking about how cumbersome the old tax code is & energized about upcoming simplification!” That may happen, but it doesn’t make her original remark correct.

Our ruling

The recently passed bill takes effect for the 2018 tax year, for which people will be filing returns in 2019, not this coming April. And there is no plan for a postcard filing option. Simple filing options already exist and are widely used, but tax experts do not expect a surge in their use. We rate her statement False.