To: Members of the House Committee on Ways and Means
From: National Taxpayers Union
Date: January 13, 2026
Subject: NTU’s Support for BARCODE Efficiency Act - January 14 Markup
I. Introduction
On behalf of National Taxpayers Union, the nation’s oldest taxpayer advocacy organization, we write to express our support for the BARCODE Efficiency Act, which is slated for consideration before the House Committee on Ways and Means on January 14, 2026. NTU applauds the Committee for your efforts to advance proposals that improve services, as well as lowering administrative costs, for taxpayers.
II. Legislation: HR 6956 - the BARCODE Efficiency Act
This legislation would require the IRS to use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to transcribe all handwritten returns or correspondence received by the agency. This is something that the IRS should be doing already, and typically would not require the passage of a law to make happen. However, the IRS has lagged in modernizing operations for years, leading to delays in return processing, as well as late responses to taxpayer correspondence. For example, in 2024, over 66% of taxpayer correspondence received a response over 45 days after IRS receipt. And, at the conclusion of the 2025 tax year, 3.8 million tax returns remained unprocessed. While the IRS has worked to implement more digitization in its operations, its full implementation is long overdue.
III. Conclusion
Sometimes a piece of legislation is needed that would require an agency to implement what one would assume would be an obvious solution to administrative problems. The bill should typically not be needed. However, at the IRS, where continued efforts to modernize operations have yielded only lukewarm results, sometimes it takes some direct instructions from Congress to make improvements happen. We applaud Congressmen Schneider and Yakym for introducing this legislation, and the Ways and Means Committee for considering it. We highly recommend its passage. Should you have any questions about the recommendations in this memo, please do not hesitate to reach out to David Timmons (dtimmons@ntu.org).