livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
Why Does It Cost $409 Billion To Figure Out What We Owe In Taxes
ax Reform: If President Trump wants to drain the swamp, the best place to start is with the tax code, which is so complicated that Americans spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars just trying to figure out how much they owe.
The IRS instructions for filing out the 1040 form include a box near the back that estimates how much time it takes to fill that one form out. This year, it's 15 hours. That's a 67% increase from 1988. This year, the instruction booklet runs 241 pages. In 1988 it was fewer than 80.
The tax code has become so complicated that even the IRS complains about it. In its annual report to Congress, the IRS' national taxpayer advocate, Nina E. Olson, writes that the tax code imposes a "significant, even unconscionable, burden on taxpayers."
This is the hidden tax.
Olson figures that individuals and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours — the equivalent of more than three million full-time workers — complying with the tax code.
Almost no one can figure it out on their own anymore. IRS data show that 90% of individual taxpayers either hire companies like H&R Block (HRB) to do their taxes, or buy software to help them navigate the forms.
Various groups have tried to calculate the total cost of tax compliance, and the numbers are staggering. The National Taxpayers Union puts the bill at $262 billion, when you count direct costs and lost productivity. The Tax Foundation says it's more like $409 billion.
Either way, "if tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States," Olson notes.
http://www.investors.com/politics/e...-tax-which-everyone-pays-but-no-one-collects/
ax Reform: If President Trump wants to drain the swamp, the best place to start is with the tax code, which is so complicated that Americans spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars just trying to figure out how much they owe.
The IRS instructions for filing out the 1040 form include a box near the back that estimates how much time it takes to fill that one form out. This year, it's 15 hours. That's a 67% increase from 1988. This year, the instruction booklet runs 241 pages. In 1988 it was fewer than 80.
The tax code has become so complicated that even the IRS complains about it. In its annual report to Congress, the IRS' national taxpayer advocate, Nina E. Olson, writes that the tax code imposes a "significant, even unconscionable, burden on taxpayers."
This is the hidden tax.
Olson figures that individuals and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours — the equivalent of more than three million full-time workers — complying with the tax code.
Almost no one can figure it out on their own anymore. IRS data show that 90% of individual taxpayers either hire companies like H&R Block (HRB) to do their taxes, or buy software to help them navigate the forms.
Various groups have tried to calculate the total cost of tax compliance, and the numbers are staggering. The National Taxpayers Union puts the bill at $262 billion, when you count direct costs and lost productivity. The Tax Foundation says it's more like $409 billion.
Either way, "if tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States," Olson notes.
http://www.investors.com/politics/e...-tax-which-everyone-pays-but-no-one-collects/
