THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Justice (DOJ) has given its blessing to the creation of a consortium that would work with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide free electronic tax preparation and filing services.

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The consortium, which still awaits the approval of the U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has not been formed, but is expected to be in place for the 2002 tax season, according to officials who have been working with the government to move forward with the public-private project.

The program would help the IRS achieve its goal of receiving 80 percent of all U.S. tax returns electronically by 2007, and would assure companies that provide electronic tax preparation and filing services that the government will not get into the business of providing those services for free.

The DOJ did not list the companies that will comprise the consortium, however, Scott Gulbransen, a spokesman for the tax software specialist Intuit, confirmed Thursday that Intuit will be a member.

"We are excited to be a part of it because we feel the IRS and the OMB have done a good job of looking at options for taxpayers and not duplicating services that the private sector is providing," Gulbransen said.

An estimated 1 million taxpayers took advantage of Intuit's Tax Freedom project when filing their 2001 returns, Gulbransen said. The 5-year-old program, which provides free tax preparation and filing services to people with adjusted gross incomes of $25,000 or less, is an example of how free services will be provided through the IRS Web site once the program is fully established, Gulbransen said.

The Justice Department believes the partnership between companies that provide electronic tax filing services and the IRS promises to make free electronic tax preparation and filing services more readily available, Charles A. James, assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in a news release Monday. James said the DOJ found no anticompetitive reason that the consortium shouldn't be formed. The consortium will encourage taxpayers to take advantage of simple and speedy options for electronic filing of their tax returns, James said. Consortium membership will be open to all companies and people meeting certain standards set forth by the IRS and the consortium, James said.

Intuit and a number of other technology companies, including Microsoft, Electronic Data Systems, IBM, Unisys and Computer Sciences, are members of the Alexandria, Virginia-based Council for Electronic Revenue Communication Advancement (CERCA), which has been working to promote the electronic filing of tax returns.

Steps to establish the consortium can be made very quickly once the remaining government approvals are granted, said Mike Cavanagh, executive director of CERCA.

"We in the industry have been talking to Treasury and the IRS to deal with this, and so while the pieces are being finalized, they are not final yet," Cavanagh said.

James provided some detail about how the consortium members would provide their services in a letter he sent Monday to the consortium's lawyer. The consortium participants' free electronic tax preparation and filing services will be made available at a Web site controlled and hosted by the IRS, which will rank consortium participants into five tiers, he said. Each participant will get one listing on the IRS Web page.

The IRS will have the authority to determine the final content that appears on the page and will market the free services together with the consortium, James said. In addition, he wrote, the IRS will not endorse specific offerings or products and will continue to accept electronic filing services from organizations not in the consortium.