Formless

The package of forms and publications ordered from the IRS and sent by UPS instead of the Postal Service lacked the most wanted forms and publications, including the all-important Publication 17, which includes every bit of information for the non-business side of filing. For some missing publications the information provided is that they will be shipped later; for others, that they're temporarily out of print. This appears to be a case of deliberate under-supply and also yet another instance of out-sourcing to the customer or person being served, akin to checking out your own groceries. Instead of having information delivered to the door, we're expected to pay for photocopying it or downloading and printing it (don't anybody talk about paperless information; for a literate person there's no substitute for paper and it's much, much faster to skim it than to search screens and wait for them to load and to be able to view one or smaller and smaller parts of additional pages as they're cascaded or tiled). Perhaps this is an exercise in driving people to paid tax-preparation services and discouraging them from preparing their returns themselves or being able to help others to do so.