This is not surprising since IRS employees (Forbes says that there are 97,440 of them) don't even give the same answers to tax questions. The US tax code - with its "nine million word mountain of verbiage" - is so complex and "littered with impenetrable passages" that a fictional tax return given by Money magazine to forty-five tax preparers resulted in forty-five different calculations of the correct amount of tax due. The cost in dollars is now about $200 billion. Lost productivity is in the billions of hours.
Compliance costs in terms of time have skyrocketed from an average of 17 hours and 7 minutes fifteen years ago to 28 hours and 30 minutes today. In addition to his accurate description of the horrific US tax code, Forbes also correctly points out the huge costs of complying with the tax code. As a Republican presidential candidate in 19, he campaigned on a platform of medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system, school choice, term limits, a strong national defense, and a flat tax - the subject of his new book. He also sits on the board of the National Taxpayers Union. Our horrifically heavy, appallingly complex, corruption-inducing tax code.įorbes, of course, is the overseer of the Forbes publishing empire.A multi-headed hydra of countless brackets, deductions, and exemptions.In his new book, Flat Tax Revolution (Regnery, 2005), which is subtitled Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS, Steve Forbes pulls no punches when describing the federal income tax code:
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