You are correct, of course. I was writing my comment with two ideas: a) venting some steam as I'm of course upset that I can't e-file; b) telling that things so

You are correct, of course. I was writing my comment with two ideas: a) venting some steam as I'm of course upset that I can't e-file; b) telling that things some take for granted, such as an ability to file electronically, aren't really universal. I suppose the issue is that they had to start from scratch. It's not really about software, it's only a data structure here that's problematic - an XML schema that doesn't allow to make some value kind of optional. IRS most certainly has an existing data structure that can handle all scenarios. They don't just file outlier cases as a paper in some cabinet - they do digitize those mail-in forms and input them into a computer. I had downloaded back a transcript and it's all in there, my 1040 was digitized, so I know it for a fact. It's just probably that it's hidden in an ugly giant legacy system (possibly involving some Fortran-running mainframe somewhere) so they weren't able to realistically extract this full schema from there. Or deemed it too flawed. A shame that they probably will never be able to afford a proper rewrite (sometimes legacy code gets too convoluted it becomes impossible to treat it as anything but a black box).