Marilyn Hajj (Virginia), Frequently Unanswered Questions: Scrutinizing the IRS's Informal Guidance:

Every year, a majority of Americans file taxes—but their tax returns often contain errors. The Internal Revenue Service provides informal tax guidance, including FAQs posted on their website, to assist taxpayers in fulfilling their obligations. These FAQs are meant to present tax information in a more readable way and offer supposedly clear information to help address taxpayers' questions. But do they actually achieve this goal? This study, the first of its kind, presents a pioneering analysis of the readability of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) posted on the IRS’s website, focusing on information most useful to lower-income taxpayers. In doing so, it makes significant interdisciplinary contributions to both the tax and poverty law literatures.

Leveraging established readability formulas such as the Gunning Fog Index and the Flesch Reading Ease score, I scrutinize these FAQs against benchmarks from the Virginia Tax Review and the Virginia Driver’s Manual. To overcome the limitations of traditional readability formulas, I developed an enhanced version of the Gunning Fog Index that accounts for content complexity, including tax jargon.

The study’s findings reveal a concerning trend: IRS FAQs are at least as difficult to comprehend as specialized legal texts from the Virginia Tax Review, posing significant barriers for the general public. The stark readability gap between these FAQs and the more accessible Virginia Driver’s Manual underscores the urgent need for improvement. This paper highlights the inadequacies of current IRS guidance and proposes incorporating cognitive psychology and psycholinguistic findings, as well as advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, to fully evaluate the accessibility of what is meant to be the simplest form of IRS guidance. By doing so, this paper aims to contribute to the tax literature and the broader readability discourse, advocating for tax information that is comprehensible to all, especially the most vulnerable taxpayers.

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