One of the most devastating assessments of our federal tax code has come from an unlikely source: the federal government itself!
As you may or may not know, there is a position in the federal government called the “national taxpayer advocate.” The person holding that job has the duty to point out and, one hopes, head off abuses of taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service or by the tax code itself.
Well, the current national taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, has issued a remarkably frank evaluation of the tax code, and she is not pleased – at all.
Quoting from her recent annual report to Congress, we’ll let Ms. Olson take it from here:
“The most serious problem facing taxpayers – and the IRS – is the complexity of the internal revenue code,” she writes.