it’s any comfort to know someone is feeling your pain this tax season, look no further than Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate at the IRS. In her annual report to Congress, she told lawmakers that the tax system they’ve helped create requires almost 60 percent of us to hire professional tax preparers and another 30 percent to pay $50 or more for commercial software.
The average taxpayer will spend 18 hours filling out a personal return, which is not surprise since Congress has made nearly 5,000 changes to the tax code since 2001 -- an average of more than one a day. The code itself at more than 73,000 pages imposes a “significant, even unconscionable, burden on taxpayers,” Olson concluded.
And that was before the fiscal cliff deal, which piled on more complexity by creating another income tax bracket, new rules limiting personal exemptions, and a new 20-percent bracket on capital gains and qualified dividends. T
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