Golly GE-e, that's one enormous e-filing

The biggest tax return in the country is now in the IRS's hands.

It comes from corporate giant General Electric. You know, those guys that Dave Letterman, when he worked for the company's NBC subsidiary, used to refer to as "the pinheads at GE."

Well, they look pretty smart now.

In addition to filing the nation's largest return, the company's accountants sent it electronically. The 237 MB return was transmitted to the IRS on May 18 and GE got an acknowledgement about an hour later that it had been successfully filed.

If the return had been printed out, it would have filled around 24,000 pages. The tree-huggers of the world thank you, GE, for saving so much of our planet's flora.

Companies have been able to e-file since 2004. In 2005, more than 200,000 of them sent corporate returns electronically. This year, the IRS required corporations with assets of $50 million or more to e-file.

While the GE return is the largest big-company filing, it's not the first.

The IRS reports that more than 4,750 large corporations have e-filed this year, including 3,042 in the $50-million-plus-assets category. The agency expects electronic returns from more than 10,000 large companies by the time the extended Sept. 15 corporate filing date rolls around.

Next year, corporations that have assets of $10 million or more also will face mandatory e-filing.

On the personal side, more than 70 million of us e-filed our 1040s this year. That's 6.2 percent more than did so last year.

Even more of us are doing it ourselves: 19.7 million returns came into the IRS this year via home computers, an 18 percent increase over the previous filing season.

And the 2006 average individual refund check also was larger than the year before, coming to $2,237 (or even higher -- $2,607 -- in cases where the refund was directly deposited).

There's no word from the IRS on GE's refund or tax liability amount.

Carnival's coming: Just a quick reminder, the inaugural Carnival of Taxes will be posted here on Don't Mess With Taxes on Monday, June 5. For more on the carnival, check out this post.

If you have an item you'd like included, please e-mail it to [email protected]. Or you can submit it via the Blog Carnival form here.

Two requirements: The item must be primarily tax-oriented and you need to get it in by 11 p.m. CDT on Saturday, June 3.

Thanks! We're looking forward to hearing from you.