Electronic Filing and Payment Fairness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaHOOD. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of my bill, the Electronic Filing and Payment Fairness Act.

This commonsense bill, which has been included in the ``National Taxpayer Advocate 2025 Purple Book'' of legislative recommendations, would amend the tax code to apply the ``mailbox rule'' to electronic submissions of payments and documents to the Internal Revenue Service.

As the chairman articulated, under current law, if a taxpayer physically mails a payment or tax return to the IRS that is postmarked on the due date, that payment or tax return is considered timely even if it is received a week later. If a taxpayer submits the same payment or return to the IRS electronically on the due date, however, it is considered late if the IRS receives or processes it the following day.

This disparity punishes taxpayers electing to correspond with the IRS electronically, which should be the preferred method of communication in this day and age.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairman Smith for his leadership and for making tax administration and improved efficiencies a priority within the Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I also thank my bipartisan co-leads on this bill, Representatives DelBene, Feenstra, Schneider, Fitzpatrick, and Panetta.

This is a great step in our effort to modernize the IRS and make it more user-friendly, especially for the roughly 90 percent of taxpayers already filing electronically.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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