September 24, 2020
It’s the IRS’s goal to help all taxpayers, no matter where they live, their background or what language they speak. As part of this effort, the IRS is expanding information and assistance available to taxpayers in additional languages.
For the first time, the 2020 Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return will be available in Spanish. It will also allow taxpayers to indicate whether they want to be contacted in a language other than English. This is a new feature available this coming filing season.
Here are some other changes that are part of the multilingual initiative.
- Publication 1, Your Rights as a Taxpayer and other basic tax information is now available in 20 languages on IRS.gov.
- Many pages of IRS.gov are now available in seven other languages: Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Haitian Creole and Chinese, Simplified and Traditional.
- Taxpayers who interact with an IRS representative now have access to over the phone interpreter services in more than 350 languages.
- The 2020 version of Publication 17, Your Federal Income Tax will be available early next year in six other languages – Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean and Chinese, Simplified and Traditional.
The agency is also inserting information about translation services and other multilingual options into some taxpayer notices. In addition, the agency continues to increase multilingual outreach on Instagram, Twitter and its other social media platforms.
Source: IRS