what I should do to be complian. >> After a trial run in 12
states was deemed a success, the IRS is launching direct file
nationwide in 2025, including in Wisconsin. The free electronic
filing system will allow people to complete their federal
returns online, and then taxpayers will be taken to the
Wisconsin tax filing site. The hope that taxpayers will save
time and money because, according to the U.S. Department
of Treasury, the average taxpayer spends approximately 13
hours and $270 to prepare their taxes each year. Here to detail
direct file is Wisconsin Secretary of Revenue David
Casey. And thanks very much for being here.
>> Thank you for having me. >> I appreciate the opportunity.
>> So why did the government decide to go with this direct
file? >> Well, I think, thanks to
Senator Baldwin and Governor Evers here in Wisconsin, we had
the investment or, sorry, the Inflation Reduction Act passed
that funded some some of the activity at the IRS and
technology advancements. So Direct File was a direct result
of that, we here at the Department of Revenue actually
started a program, a couple of years ago. We had some foresight
on this and created Wiz tax and online filing tool primary. You
know, motivation for this was to provide another tool for our
taxpayers to use. You know, right now they can use a third
party vendor for the pay as you file type software approach,
where they can also use our community of tax preparers,
which are very helpful, but we saw that there was a niche of
taxpayers who were spending too much time and too much money and
thought that direct file would be a good solution for them.
>> So how many Wisconsin taxpayers will be eligible to
use it? about 600,000. Taxpayers will be
eligible for the eligibility. You really just need to be a
wage earner with less complicated income. So no
interest income or for example, no real estate income. So the
majority of Wisconsinites have a particular wage income and
that's it, and then also some limited credits that you can
apply for will have the earned income tax credit and some
others, but it's fairly limited at this point.
>> So how does it compare or compete with, say, TurboTax?
>> Probably, you know, from a comparison or it's not really a
competition. It's filling a void that we've had, you know, the
pay as you file tax preparers offer an excellent service and
they, they provide a service to what we think is just the more
the more complicated tax returns, if you've got more
complex financial, background and tax obligations, they're a
great solution. What we found, however, was that a number of
taxpayers with what we call just the simplified, though the wage
earner approach, were paying to file when we could offer that
same product for free. >> So we know it's free. But is
it easy to use? I mean, people won't get all balled up in the
online confusion of it. >> It's well, we hope it's very
easy to use. We know our wiz tech solution when we piloted
that over the last couple of years, grew from a few hundred
users the first year to tens of thousands of users the second
year. So it was very popular. We've also heard from those 12
states that piloted Direct File last year that it's averaging 15
to 20 minutes for a user to complete both their federal and
their state return. One of the ways that we achieve that is
that once you file your federal return, you go to the state
site. It's pre-populated with all of the tax information from
your federal return, which is the basis of the Wisconsin
return. So we get all of that demographic. Financial
information is all pre-populated. So it's
state return, it's a review. You review what you have. You apply
for any additional credits that the state may, may offer. And
then you submit it as easy as that.
for whatever reason, are they able to reach out to the
Wisconsin Department of Revenue for help?
>> Absolutely. We have an excellent customer service team
that we are training up on direct file. It will be a new
application for us to administer, they'll be ready and
waiting for the calls, though frankly, the direct file
solution is so user friendly we don't anticipate a lot of need