One Reason Tax Returns Are So Complicated? Because H&R Block and Other Preparers Like It That Way.

[KamaAina]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/04/18/happy_tax_day_here_s_why_your_taxes_are_so_complicated.html

“Your life is busy, growing,” goes an ad touting H&R Block’s most recent offering, Block Advisors.* “That means tax complexity.” What the commercial doesn’t say? That H&R Block is determined to keep it that way. So are companies like Intuit and Jackson Hewitt.

It’s not the fault of the Internal Revenue Service, it turns out, that the typical tax filer will spend about 13 hours and between $200 and $300 preparing and filing his or her annual returns, which are due Monday at midnight. It’s not the IRS that makes us so miserable that we’re more likely to die in a car accident the day our taxes are due. Tax day has become uncommonly time-consuming and miserable, and we can assign much of the blame to the lobbying muscle of the tax-prep industry, which has used its clout to stymie efforts to simplify our taxes.

How might we have had it instead? As Liz Day pointed out at ProPublica a few years back, countries including Denmark, Sweden, and Spain mail citizens prefilled forms, with salary and bank info that’s been provided to the government by employers and financial-services institutions. That could have been us! Why it’s not is a perfect illustration of how money buys power in Washington, mowing over common-sense reforms, not to mention the actual law itself.

In 1998, Congress ordered the Internal Revenue Service to implement by 2008 a “return-free” system for people with easy filings, likely something similar to what’s now common in other countries. Even before the legislation passed, the tax-prep industry went on the offensive. If the IRS doesn’t “stay out of our backyard,” a high-ranking H&R Block executive threatened, “we will take it up in Congress,” Accounting Today reported in 1998. He meant it. Since then, H&R Block and its peers have spent millions lobbying Congress—$28 million between 1998 and 2013—in what’s been a very successful effort to keep our taxes tangled.

Sounds like a good Bernie campaign issue to me.

[enlightenment]

1. Oh, I don't know if the IRS

is innocent.

Last week I spent two and a half hours trying to figure out a worksheet. It wasn't even the form; just the worksheet for the form. Thirty-six steps that reminded me of those logic puzzles that run like:

1. Eliminate all numbers that have a "w" in their name.
2. Add the first six, the last three, and every other number in-between unless the number ends in 3.
3. Subtract the total of all the numbers eliminated in 1. from the square root of 2.
4. Multiply the result of 3. by the difference between the total of numbers four through thirteen.
5. Add four.
6. Subtract five, but add two . . .