Taxpayers in the United States spend almost 15 hours preparing their tax returns. Americans even pay $240 for tax preparation services. US tax System is never the same as Estonia, which is said to be the country that has “the best tax system”.
US Tax System Explained: Reasons Why the US Has Complicated Tax Filing Process (Photo: Yahoo Finance)
Reasons Why the US Has Complicated Tax Filing Process
Taxpayers in the U.S. spend an average of 13 hours preparing their tax returns and pay $240 for tax preparation services. In 2022, US taxpayers waited 22 minutes on average to ask IRS a question, that is, if they were the 10% of callers who made it through to a live agent at the underfunded and understaffed agency.
US Tax has created an ecosystem where filing taxes is confusing, expensive, and time-consuming. Here are the reasons why US Tax Filing System is such a burden to some payers and agencies.
The US tax system is trying to do more than collect taxes. The tax system is also used by Congress to achieve economic and social goals and then relies on a beleaguered IRS to implement those plans.
Erin Collins, the National Taxpayer Advocate, told Yahoo Finance said, “Congress, in writing the law, tried to build into the code incentives for social benefits. So, for example, to enable parents to work … [there’s] the child tax credit,”
“Once you start supplementing taxable income, that’s where it starts getting complex,” Collins added.
The tax code in America wasn’t always this complex.
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