I’m listening to a tax webinar this afternoon and here are a couple of interesting statistics:
1. Letters that the IRS sends out have increase by a whopping 670% since 2001. If you felt like you were hearing more from the IRS than ever before, you were right. This is in spite of the fact that computerized tax preparation has radically reduced math errors. On the other hand, the number of tax preparation errors have skyrocketed! This alone proves that tax software will never replace a proven tax professional.
2. Audits have increased by 65% since 2001. WOW!
3. The tax code has grown for approximately 1,400,000 pages in 2001 to almost 4,000,000 pages today. Another WOW!
4. The IRS has been and is still in the process of modifying their letters and notices to make them easier to read and to understand but are having problems due to the complexities of explaining the issues in laymen’s terms.
