The tax code now exceeds 70,000 pages. The Tax Foundation’ s Joshua D. McCaherty breaks down the compliance costs to individuals and businesses in a new analysis.
The average filer spends 8 hours and $120 per non-business tax return, resulting in a total annual compliance cost exceeding 1 billion hours and $20 billion.
Each business return takes an average of 23 hours to file and costs $420, for a total annual cost of 240 million hours and $4.4 billion. Close to 30 million employment tax forms also need to be filed taking a combined 1.65 million hours costing another $12.6 billion.
Add it all up and Americans spent $37 billion and more than3 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2012 alone (the latest year data are available).
McCaherty calculates that in 2012 Americans spent the combined equivalent of nearly 370,000 years preparing and filing their tax returns. He Adds:
A simpler, transparent tax system can greatly reduce the cost of compliance for U.S. taxpayers. A complicated tax system creates not only a huge time and money expenditure for taxpayers, but also for government officials verifying returns, which can lead to higher tax burdens later.