26 U.S.C. § 6014 — Income tax return—tax not computed by taxpayer

(a) An individual may choose not to calculate their own tax if several conditions are met. The taxpayer must not itemize deductions and must not be a person described in section 6012(a)(1)(C)(i). Gross income must be under $10,000. Income must come only from wages as an employee, dividends, or interest. Non-wage income, as defined in section 3401(a), cannot exceed $100. A taxpayer who qualifies makes this choice using the required form, without showing the actual tax on the return. Instead, the Secretary calculates the tax and mails the taxpayer a notice of the amount owed. (b) The Secretary must write regulations to carry out this section. These regulations may extend the rules above to other situations. They may cover cases where gross income includes other kinds of income. They may cover cases where non-wage income, already taxed at the source, exceeds $100. They may cover cases where gross income reaches $10,000 or more. They may also cover cases where the taxpayer itemizes deductions or claims a reduced standard deduction under section 63(c)(5). For married couples, the regulations must decide when a joint return under this section is allowed or required. The regulations must also decide whether the couple's tax liability is joint and several. They must decide whether one spouse can use this section while the other does not.

The record. According to the source credit, this section was enacted as part of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, chapter 736, on August 16, 1954, appearing at 68A Stat. 736. The credit shows subsequent amendment activity spanning several decades: Pub. L. 88–272 (1964), Pub. L. 91–172 (1969), Pub. L. 94–455 (1976), Pub. L. 95–30 (1977), and Pub. L. 99–514 (1986). Each amendment altered specific subsections, reflecting ongoing legislative adjustment to the provision's terms, though the source credit does not itself describe the substance of each change beyond the statutory citations. Historical context. The 1954 Internal Revenue Code is generally understood to have been a comprehensive recodification and reorganization of federal tax law, consolidating and clarifying provisions that had accumulated since 1939. Within that broader effort, provisions allowing the Secretary to compute tax liability for taxpayers with simple returns—such as this section—are commonly associated with administrative simplification goals: reducing the burden on individual filers with straightforward income sources by shifting the computational task to the tax agency itself. The later amendments, spread across major tax acts of 1964, 1969, 1976, 1977, and 1986, likely reflect adjustments to income thresholds, definitions, and interactions with other Code provisions as those broader acts revised the tax system generally. However, the record does not establish the specific legislative purpose behind each individual amendment, and this note does not speculate as to Congress's precise reasoning for any particular change beyond the general understanding of the 1954 Code's simplifying aims.