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Tax
April 1997
Tax Paperwork Costs	According to the Internal Revenue Service, businesses will spend 3.4 billion hours and individuals about 1.8 billion hours on tax paperwork this year -- the equivalent of 3 million people, more than the entire armed forces, doing nothing but taxes all year. From 1954 to 1994, the number of words in the income-tax code increased to more than 800,000 from less than 200,000. Americans spend about $225 billion complying with the tax code, according to the Tax Foundation -- the equivalent of a 15 percent surtax levied on all federal tax receipts. U.S. citizens fill out nearly 308 million tax forms a year -- at an average cost of $256 per form. Even the 1040EZ form takes an estimated 2.9 hours to fill out at a cost of $122. Were Rep. Dick Armey's (R-TX) flat tax proposal to be adopted, only 91.6 million returns would be needed, at an expenditure of only $46 each on average. They would take only 1.1 hour each to fill out. Source: Ed Rubenstein, "Right Data," National Review, April 21, 1997.