![]() ![]() The National Taxpayer Advocate also noted that the tax code changed 4,680 times from 2001 to 2012, an average of once per day. Again at roughly 450 words per page, that comes out to around 9,000 pages. These regulations aren’t short: the National Taxpayer Advocate did a Microsoft Word word count of the tax statutes and IRS regulations in 2012, and came up with roughly 4 million words. Congress will set down a policy and leave it to the IRS to write all the rules to implement it. However, a tax practitioner who relies just on the tax statutes will go to jail, because so much of federal tax law is in IRS regulations, revenue rulings, and other clarifications. (By way of comparison, the King James Bible has 788,280 words War and Peace runs 560,000 words and the Harry Potter series is just over 1 million words.) Statutes and Regulations At perhaps 450 words per page, that puts the tax code at well over 1 million words. The Government Printing Office sells it spread over two volumes, and according to them, book one is 1,404 pages and book two is 1,248 pages, for a total of 2,652 pages. There’s the literal statutes that Congress has passed (Title 26 of the U.S. tax code really? There are a couple ways to look at it. But how huge and complex is it?Īndrew Grossman, the legislation counsel for the Joint Committee on Taxation that helps write tax laws, attacked us in Slate yesterday for saying that the tax code runs 70,000 pages, countering that it’s “only” 2,600 pages. ![]()
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