Mnuchin: Tax-filing ‘postcard’ to be released next week

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that the department next week will release a new tax-filing form the size of a postcard.

As Republicans worked on crafting the tax bill, they talked about simplifying the code so that people would be able to file their taxes on a postcard. The 1040 form, which is the basic tax-filing document, was two full-length pages for the last filing season.

“Next week, we will be unveiling the new 1040 [form], and it will be a postcard as we’ve promised, and hardworking taxpayers won’t have to spend nearly as much time filling out their taxes,” Mnuchin said at an event in the Capitol highlighting the six-month anniversary of the tax law’s passage. 

Some taxpayers will find the new tax code simpler because they will end up taking the new tax code’s larger standard deduction instead of itemizing their deductions. But Republicans didn’t do away with many tax preferences, so it’s unclear how large the postcard will be, or how big the font will be on it.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote in a piece for Forbes earlier this year that only a few lines on the 1040 form will disappear due to the tax law. These lines mainly dealt with personal exemptions, which were eliminated under the new law in exchange for a larger standard deduction.