Tax Code Complexity Now Costs U.S. Economy up to $1 Trillion Annually

by | Dec 12, 2016

Tax Code Complexity Now Costs U.S. Economy up to $1 Trillion Annually

by | Dec 12, 2016

74,608 pages, 2.4 million words.

That is the present size of Title 26 of the U.S. Code, i.e. the “Internal Revenue Code.” One would think this would be nearly impossible for an enterprise wielding an army of tax experts to absorb, let alone the average taxpayer. However, it doesn’t stop there.

The IRS has added an additional 7.7 million words of tax regulations designed to clarify what the original 2.4 million words mean. You can’t make this stuff up. Add 60,000 pages of tax-related case law essential to accountants and tax lawyers, and the burden is revealed.

More than 10 million words with a hidden annual compliance cost of up to $1 trillion. This is what Title 26 of the U.S. code and the Federal Register is estimated to cost the United States economy each year.

audit-final

Data aggregated by Philip D. Schlosser. Design by Philip D. Schlosser and Andrew Hawks.

To put this into perspective, the Encyclopedia Britannica — 32 volumes that contain the general knowledge of man — is 44 million words in length. This means that in order to understand the federal tax code and its supplementary regulations in their entirety, one would have to absorb highly complex tax language that is nearly one quarter the length of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

Read the rest at TaxRevolution.us.

Our Books

Shop books published by the Libertarian Institute.

Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

Our Books

Recent Articles

Recent

Mass Production Equals Mass Consumption

[R]elative shares in national income have remained substantially constant over the last hundred years. This, however, is true only if we measure them in money. Measured in real terms, relative shares have substantially changed in favor of the lower income groups. This...

read more
Shooting Down Russian Drones Over Poland

Shooting Down Russian Drones Over Poland

The world is now closer to a full-scale war between NATO and Russia than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the early morning hours of September 10, 2025, Western air defenses spotted a fleet of Russian drones that had entered Poland’s...

read more

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This