""David Keating of the National Taxpayers Union provides a useful perspective on how big the tax compliance industry is. According to his research, as of 2009 the income-tax industry employed "more workers than are employed at the five biggest employers among Fortune 500 companies—more than all the workers at Wal-Mart Stores, United Parcel Service, McDonald's, International Business Machines, and Citigroup combined." Without diminishing in any way the professionalism of tax attorneys, accountants and financial planners, all of these efforts produce nothing other than, well, tax compliance.
Citizens should be able to comply with the tax code without having to spend absurd amounts of money to do so. The fact that there is such a large compliance markup in our tax system indicates that the tax system has gone awry. All of these hours could have been used for something a lot more productive than just making sure our taxes are filed and paid correctly.
An obvious alternative use is work, either as an employee or an entrepreneur. We will never know how many more businesses could have been started if we did not spend billions of hours on tax compliance. But we do know approximately how much our economy would benefit if we could use our "tax-compliance time" more productively. ""
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| Source: Bureaus of Labor Statistics |
I cannot vouch for the numbers, but even if it is HALF that many workers in the tax industry it is way too many...Paying taxes is a civic duty and every citizen should do it when required. We can debate about how much we should pay, but that is a separate issue. The tax forms should be one or two pages MAX, and someone with a high school education should be able to fill it out. It has become an oppressive task and encourages tax evasion. Please, Congress, K.I.S.S.!
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