US tax code longer than Bible _ without good news
By By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
WASHINGTON (AP) - Too intimidated to fill out your tax return without help? Join the club.
At nearly 4 million words, the U.S. tax law is so thick and complicated that businesses and individuals spend more than 6 billion hours a year complying with filing requirements, according to a report Wednesday by an independent government watchdog.
That's the equivalent of 3 million people working full-time, year-round.
"If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States," says the report by Nina E. Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate.
The days of most taxpayers sitting down with a pencil and a calculator to figure out their taxes are long gone, Olson said. Since 2001, Congress has made almost 5,000 changes to U.S. tax law. That's an average of more than one a day.
http://money.msn.com/taxes/news.aspx?fe … d=15976693
If the tax codes were changed to a straight percentage, think of how many poor accountants, IRS agents and tax software developers would be out of work!
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