Annual Tax Documents with QR Codes

INTENTIONS

The concept of adding QR codes to annual tax documents has the following intentions:

• Eliminate data entry errors in the income tax return preparation process
• Reduce time spent in tax preparation
• Reduce programming costs associated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology
• Increase success rate of tax document scanning over OCR
• Provide a simple mechanism for tax document issuers and tax software to integrate without having to build full-fledged API connections

THE TECHNOLOGY — DATA NOT URL

Two-dimensional bar codes, known as QR codes, store information as a series of pixels in a square-shaped grid that can be quickly retrieved using computer devices such as smartphones.

Issuers of annual tax documents can encode document data as QR codes. Tax software smartphone applications can scan the code for inclusion of the data in income tax returns of individuals and businesses. Scanning the code with a generic QR code reader app can display the data, but the app won't know what to do with it.

The diagram below illustrates the workflow.