Income Tax Rant
So, I own a company. It’s a “subchapter-S” corporation, which means I have, supposedly, simpler taxation.
For “Form 1120S,” just one of the many forms I have to file, the IRS says that the average time we spend on the forms will be:
- 65 hours, 45 minutes “Recordkeeping”
- 25 hours, 52 minutes “Learning the form”
- 48 hours, 27 minutes “Preparing the form”
- 5 hours, 54 minutes “Mailing the form”
146 HOURS! More than three-and-half weeks! And this is a form for “small businesses.” And that doesn’t include the supplements that go with it (another 64 hours, according to the IRS estimate). Thats over 200 hours a year, just for the income tax (which doesn’t include all of the other State Revenue, Unemployment, Workers’ Comp, Ad Valorem, Business Personal Property, Occupational Tax Certificate, Sales Tax, FUTA, FICA, Medicare, and Social Security returns.)
If you assume 40 hour work weeks and two weeks vacation a year, it works out to about 2000 hours in a work-year. That doesn’t include sick days or holidays. So, regardless of how much we make or what percentage of your money actually goes to taxes, you get to throw away another 10-15% of your time just to prove you really paid the right amount.
So never mind the fact that after all deductions, etc. that I paid close to 30% of everything I made, by the time you factor in wasting time with forms when I could be working and making more money, I end up only getting half of what I could make.
Don’t get me wrong. I really appreciate a lot of things that my taxes pay for. I like having air traffic controllers, national parks, good highways, most everything cool at NASA, fire fighters, and a lot of other good things that my taxes are used for. But if I could spend that time making more money, the IRS would get more in taxes because I made more. We would both win! Don’t forget, they get to process all of this “stuff” too.
The only reason I can think of that the tax world is the way it is would be that accountants and lawyers lobby congress to keep it complex so they have jobs. Well, I have bad news for all you accountants out there…. Your jobs are getting outsourced to India next.
