Tax Code under Scrutiny
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The House Ways and Means Committee will start hearings Thursday
(1/20/11) on reforming our enormously costly and always expanding
tax code.
The IRS National Taxpayer Advocate recently released its annual
report to Congress, and noted that the tax code has swelled from
about 700,000 words in 1975 to 3.8 million words
today. The same report found there were 4,428 changes to
the tax code - about one a day - over the past decade, and in 2010
there were 579 changes to the code.
The report also reveals the amount of time and money spent
complying with the current code, and noted that an analysis of IRS
data found that taxpayers and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours a
year to comply with the code. The report says "If tax
compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the
United States. To consume 6.1 billion hours, the 'tax industry'
requires the equivalent of more than three million full-time
workers."
The report finds that about 90 percent of taxpayers use a tax
preparer or software programs to file their taxes, but the IRS
still got 110 million calls from taxpayers in the last two
years. Olson said the IRS was unable to answer 25 percent of
the calls-roughly 55 million calls over two years.
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