Fill-in Forms

[Edsel]

How is the best way to acquire (or download) fill-in forms from the IRS website?  I can imagine there are commercial firms making these available for a fee, but I would think the IRS furnishes fill-in forms somewhere on their massive website...

[Lion EA]

IRS Forms & Publications; search as you wish, current year, or exact form #, or name or.... Then click on the form. For instance, here's a W-4:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf

If you find a RED form, look into e-filing instead. And, a few forms still say DRAFT, not for filing (but they often can be e-filed, just not ready for paper filing, yet.)

Can you be more specific about the form you need?

[ILLMAS]

Buy yourself Adobe X Pro or Adobe Pro DC, I also use this product to send my clients encrypted password protected documents instead of using a portal or a share file.

[Edsel]

1 hour ago, Lion EA said:

Can you be more specific about the form you need?

Specifically looking for Form 8879.  Thanks for the link, but it opens up forms that are not fillable.

[Roberts]

Foxit Reader is a free pdf viewer that allows editing. It works very much like Adobe.

 

I access a website for work that for one application requires Adobe. That's the only problem I've ever had with it.

[Abby Normal]

We use Foxit for everyday viewing & notating PDFs. We also use Kofax (formerly Nuance) to make PDFs searchable, convert to a fillable form, rearrange, delete, crop pages, add page numbers to ATX organizers, etc.

[Medlin Software, Dennis]

Some PDF programs allow "writing" on them, even if the file was not created as a fill in form.  I use foxit too, and I don't recall having any issues marking up forms when needed.

I dropped Adobe years ago because they added a setting, with a default, which caused some files to appear in an alternate font, even though the file had embedded fonts the file designer intended to be used.

[Lion EA]

I filled in this one with my info; here's a blank for you:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8879.pdf

[Abby Normal]

Most IRS and state forms are fillable these days, and when I encounter one that's not, I run it through the forms feature of my PDF editor and make it fillable.

[Lion EA]

You should be able to fill in an 8879 in your tax prep software, even if you have to create a dummy return to use the name you need.

But, why do you need to fill in an 8879 for a client who is NOT in your tax prep software? What are you trying to achieve?

[Gail in Virginia]

On 1/22/2020 at 10:07 AM, Edsel said:

Specifically looking for Form 8879.  Thanks for the link, but it opens up forms that are not fillable.

When I click the link, the form that comes up is not fillable but in the top right corner is a button to open in another viewer.  If I click that, and open in Acrobat DC (the free version) the form becomes fillable.  I am using Firefox for my browser.  I don't know if that helps. 

[Edsel]

Several suggestions that work.  Thanks to all respondents.

Edsel

[Abby Normal]

On 1/24/2020 at 9:15 AM, Gail in Virginia said:

When I click the link, the form that comes up is not fillable but in the top right corner is a button to open in another viewer.  If I click that, and open in Acrobat DC (the free version) the form becomes fillable.  I am using Firefox for my browser.  I don't know if that helps. 

Sounds like you have PDFs opening in your browser. The only time I would use that setting is if there was no pdf reader on the computer. Unfortunately, it seems to be a default setting because so my of my clients end up in that PDF purgatory with no clue how to get out.