IRS Commissioner Admits Tax Code is Too Confusing: “I Do Not Do My Own Tax Return”

Everyone knows that tax season sucks, and it’s not just because we have to fork over our hard-earned dollars to a wasteful government. To add insult to injury, our government has devised one of the most complicated tax codes in the world. Every year, most of us agonize over getting our taxes done right, or we spend more money to have someone else prepare our taxes. You know it’s bad, when even the head of the IRS doesn’t prepare his own taxes.

That’s what IRS Commissioner John Koskinin admitted at a National Press Club luncheon last week.

“Actually, I do get a refund myself. And what I usually do is then figure out how much of it I can use to start paying my estimated taxes for the next year, as that goes. So I’m just like everybody else – confused a little by the tax code. I do not do my own tax return, even though I went to law school and took tax courses, but the code, compared to when I was in law school, is phenomenally more complex and more difficult to understand.”

Koskinin said that he’d like to have the tax code simplified, but admitted that he doesn’t think it’ll happen anytime soon. On the subject of moving to a one page form that could reduce staff or eliminate the IRS entirely, he stated:

“So if we ended up with the one-pager and everybody could fill it out without worrying about a lot of deductions – we have tax expenditures of $1.3 trillion or more a year. So you could lower rates a lot, get rid of all of that, and have a much simpler process for taxpayers and at that point, we would be able to do with fewer people…The likelihood of that probably is not great.”