What you need to know
- The agency reviews its forms every three years.
- This form is used to report withdrawals from pensions, life insurance, and retirement plans.
- Sending out forms for all types of distributions consumes more than 50 million working hours each year.
Are you angry about how complicated the tax forms are for providing and owning pensions?
You can email the Internal Revenue with your thoughts on Form 1099-R. Someone from the IRS should read it.
According to a notice published this week in the Federal Register, the IRS is subjecting Form 1099-R to periodic review under the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995. The law requires the IRS to subject most of its forms to a paperwork review every three years.
Taxpayers can use the review process to provide suggestions to the IRS on how to make a form like the 1099-R more user-friendly or how to make the instructions clearer and easier to understand.
Because the document review process typically receives little attention from companies, business groups, other stakeholders, and the public, any comments submitted in response to feedback requests may receive more attention than the usual attention from regulators.
What it means: By providing comments on ways to improve Form 1099-R, you can gain a small opportunity to improve the form and a little experience in lobbying at the grassroots level.
Form 1099-R: Form 1099-R is a form that insurers or other payers can use to report payouts from pensions, retirement plans, profit-sharing plans, individual retirement accounts, individual annuities, insurance contracts, and some other arrangements.
The form itself and its instructions take up eight pages in the form design package.
The full set of instructions for Form 1099-R is 26 pages long.
Five things you should know: Here are five more insights about Form 1099-R and the review process.
