I finished up my taxes a few days ago and sent them in "electrocutionally." What a long, complex process it can be, even if you don't have anything particularly complicated in your income picture. I still do my own taxes (with the help of a tax program). Some people think CPAs and tax lawyers are a big help, but a lot of the work is just in collecting and organizing the data, which your tax expert will mostly expect you to do for him. The one year I took my taxes to one of these "pros" a couple of decades ago, he just took the numbers I gave him and plugged them into Turbotax. Along the way, he made three errors in data entry, one transposing a $3,000 interest deduction into 300; if I hadn't caught them, no one would have. So I went back to doing my own taxes.
Every year at this time, millions of taxpayers think, why can't this all be made simpler? It can. And if it were, I'm sure the IRS would be happy -- less work, less paper, easier to detect fraud, and probably overall, greater revenue with less fuss. But we all know it won't happen; Congress is not going to stop tinkering with the tax code as a way to influence behavior, provide benefits to specific industries or areas, and the like.
Politically, I doubt that it could happen, even if every Congressperson swore an oath to simplify tax laws. Certain interest groups, industries, regions, all now have a stake in keeping the code the way it is, with all its little arcane, difficult-to-track bennies for them. Another group has a different motivation to resist change: A simplified tax code would put all those tax lawyers and accountants on the bread line; the empires of Turbotax and similar taxpayer programs would collapse.
I use Turbotax myself; it seems accurate and saves a lot of calculation. But I hit the wrong radio button to print out a copy of my forms and the program shot out 165 pages of thinly sliced tree ... which is where it comes to light that Turbotax itself may be part of the problem. It seems that for nearly every IRS form, there's also a Turbotax worksheet, and some of them are pretty inane. For each different charity you gave cash to during the year, the program will spit out, if you allow it, a three-page "worksheet" - a dozen charities means nearly 50 pages, none of which contain more than one number - the amount you gave. Then there are the forms that print out with nothing but zeros - a depreciation schedule, when I don't have any depreciation (well, OK, at my age I do have depreciation, but not in my assets).
This is just an effort to make the complicated look even more complicated, but it's one reason that the people and software companies that "help" you with your taxes will oppose tax simplification.
Comments