Thu 19 Jan 2006
The U.S. Postal Service has announced that they will no longer be offering tax forms in their local branches. This is due to budget cuts, I believe, plus a lowering demand for the printed forms. They say that the “standard” print forms will still be available in public libraries.
Academic libraries have already begun discontinuing carrying print-based tax forms (ours is one of them). There is a lower demand for tax forms in academic libraries than in public libraries due to the constituency served, and, between online tax-prep services, software programs, and online forms available for download, these required forms for filing taxes are actually becoming MORE ubiquitous, not harder to find. Visit http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html to find any of the forms you need.
Na
January 26th, 2006 at 10:21:54
At MCPL we are the only game in town in Bloomington, and each year we have the same dicsussion about how long we think we should keep providing forms. On the one hand it is something people consistently say they appreciate about us, which is great PR. Nevertheless, it is A LOT of work for one of my staff members.
Eventually, I foresee this service dissappearing, but not any time real soon. We have dispersed between 10%-25% fewer forms each year since 2001 and that trend will probably remain steady. At our peak, in the late nineties, we were handing out nearly 200,000 forms (state and fed) in total. That has been cut in half during the intervening years.