Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.
As crappy as modern printers are, they provide an oversized amount of peace of mind for me.
...what year is this? Like, I have some questions:
1) Why keep hard copies of documents created electronically when there are so many more redundant, more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic versions themselves?
2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?
Well, it includes social-security numbers for starters, and may also include bank account routing information (where to send the refund check, or withdraw in case of extra payment needed).
2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something you have all the details on and are making vast assumptions.
There are still much more convenient and technically superior methods than using physical paper copies if that is your concern.
> ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another.
Using "unscrupulous, if not criminal, activity" as an example in this instance doesn't seem like the best argument.
Any digital record has a huge number of failure modes. For security you'll want to encrypt, when encrypted you'll now have another piece of data you need to secure and backup. You have to ensure the backup services are secure. If any of these become insecure how do you trace the insecure accesses? If it was accessed from overseas what do you do about it?
Criminal activity is common, but lets go with something that would be criminal in one country and not in another... This gets very messy with cloud services where some other government can request the information. With a safe you have to get the local government to sign off on a warrant.