Question: Dreaded Tax Returns

Buried in Paper

Every spring, you can tell it's close to the April 15 tax deadline by the anxious faces of frustrated taxpayers and exhausted accountants. The U.S. tax system is one of the most complicated in the world, with almost 17,000 pages of tax code and more than 600 forms. Record keeping, education, and compliance cost the nation $265 billion annually. In 2005 it took about 115,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees and almost $10.7 billion to collect about $1 trillion from 125 million taxpayers and 7 million businesses.