Electronic Filing Off to a Slow Start.

The article reports on the claims of the General Accounting Office (GAO) that if the growth volume of electronic filing continues at its recent pace, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will fall short of its goal to have 80 million electronic returns filed in the year 2001. The GAO study yielded that in 1995, the number of electronic returns is expected to drop to about 14.8 million from 1994's 16.4 million, which the IRS attributes to its crackdown on refund fraud. The GAO estimated that only 33 million returns would be filed electronically by the year 2001.