Tax Complexity Quotes

Congress is supposed to fund the IRS, and it has been steadily reducing the number of auditors and tax collectors the IRS has at the very time that the tax system has become vastly more complicated. And of course America continues to grow, so there's an increasing number of tax returns coming in. The IRS responds by doing exactly what Congress expects of them. That shouldn't surprise anyone. All bureaucracies do what they are told.

The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?

Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.

The important thing about tax reform is you make the tax code less complicated, easier for people to understand.

Taxes are way too complicated, and people spend way too much time worrying about ways to get them lower.

I think a flat tax has merit. Anything would be better than the current tax code.

A common man, even like myself, I don't know how to pay my taxes.

The A.M.T. is much reviled by tax experts across the political spectrum for its unintended consequences and fiendish complexity.

I'm not the only taxpayer who has no idea what he's sending to the IRS. This year, only 28 percent of all Americans will prepare their own tax returns, according to a voice in my head that invents accurate-sounding statistics.

Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.

No average citizen in America today can figure out the tax code.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

There is regressivity built into the tax code by virtue of its complexity.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

There's just one thing I can't figure out. My income tax!

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

The tax code's complexity adds enormous costs to families and businesses across the country and takes nothing short of an army of federal bureaucrats to enforce.

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

Why can't Americans do their own taxes? Because the federal Tax Code is out of control, that's why. It's gigantic and insanely complex, and it gets worse all the time. Nobody has ever read the whole thing. IRS workers are afraid to go into the same ROOM with it.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

You know who a complicated tax code kills? The guy or gal trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home. So we've got to simplify our tax code.

That’s why the tax code is so long [76,000 pages]. So we can take advantage of it.

The first 9 pages of the Internal Revenue Code define income; the remaining 1,100 pages spin the web of exceptions and preferences.

If businesses don't know from state to state what the requirements are for taxes, they have to waste a lot of money on accountants and lawyers before deciding to expand their business into the state next door.

The tax code has been flawed and inefficient for a very long time, precisely because fixing it could be so terribly disruptive.