My father was a Certified Public Accountant and dinner time throughout my youth was filled with horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as he struggled to keep up with a tax code that just kept growing.
According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS who heads a staff of 2,000, the American tax system is “a huge convoluted mess.” Despite efforts to determine its length, it is variously estimated to be between 65,000 and 70,000 pages. “We looked at how many changes in the tax law (that) had occurred in the last year alone,” said Olsen, “it was something like 579 changes.” No one can keep up with that volume of changes, not even Ms. Olsen’s office.