The U.S. Internal Revenue Service just announced its Free File Alliance for 2007 taxes.

If you earn $54,000 or less you’re eligible to file your taxes for free using free tax software which you can find at www.irs.gov/. The IRS says that’s more than 97 million taxpayers. Last year more than 80 million returns were filed electronically.

Here’s the direct link to get you to Free File: www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html

Make sure you have your computer configured to accept cookies – at least from the IRS site, otherwise it won’t work.

The site’s now live so once you’ve gathered all your tax records you can start doing your taxes.

It’s been said that if you file electronically you can get your refund faster. The IRS announced if you enable direct deposit of your refund it may be processed in as little as 10 days. You also don’t have to worry about your documents getting lost or stolen in the mail.

The Free File Alliance Web site lists all the benefits as helping taxpayers, but you can bet the government benefits too. It’s much faster for a computer to process a return than a person. And cheaper too probably. Bringing it full circle, this may mean that it will cost fewer tax dollars to run the IRS. Maybe that’s stretching it.

Published: Jan 11, 2008