During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to direct the Internal Revenue Service to "give taxpayers the option of a pre-filled tax form to verify, sign and return to the IRS or online. This will eliminate the need for Americans to hire expensive tax preparers and to gather information that the federal government already has on file."

It is almost certain that Obama made this promise at the insistence of Austan Goolsbee, a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Goolsbee has been the chief cheerleader for the idea he dubbed the Simple Return.

Essentially, under Goolsbee's idea, the IRS would send taxpayers a return with their income details already filled in, based on data already reported to the IRS by employers. Taxpayers with uncomplicated returns could then decide to simply sign this form and return it to the IRS, thereby avoiding the need to hire a tax preparer or wade through the details themselves.

"The Simple Return might apply to as many as 40 percent of Americans, for whom it could save up to 225 million hours of time and more than $2 billion a year in tax preparation fees," Goolsbee, then an economist at the University of Chicago's business school, wrote in a 2006 paper. "Converting the time savings into a monetary value by multiplying the hours saved by the wage rates of typical taxpayers, the Simple Return system would be the equivalent of reducing the tax burden for this group by about $44 billion over ten years."

Goolsbee added that "the program would be voluntary. Anyone who preferred to fill out his own tax form, or to pay a tax preparer to do it, would just throw the Simple Return away and file his taxes the way he does now. For the millions of taxpayers who could use the Simple Return, however, filing a tax return would entail nothing more than checking the numbers, signing the return, and then either sending a check or getting a refund."

Regardless of the idea's merits, experts we talked to said they see no progress in making it a reality. So as we watch for developments, we'll rate it Stalled.