The Tax Code for Geniuses

Okay, a quick trivia quiz – this one on the subject of “Who Said It?”

“The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.”

I’ll give you a few seconds to think about it. (If it gets your competitive juices flowing, feel free to imagine the “Final Jeopardy” music playing in the background.)

Hint: It wasn’t yours truly the one time I attempted to file my own taxes not using the short form. That would comprise several blogs in itself.

Give up?

It was Albert Einstein. 

Think about it, the above statement from the man who transformed physics and astronomy during the 20^th century and whose theory of relativity superseded Isaac Newton’s 200-year old theory of mechanics.

I think it was somewhere in the 9^th or 10^th grade that I actually learned to spell “relativity” let alone understanding its application.

But I digress.

I guess a code that runs north of 1 million words and requires at least two or three sequoia trees to print out, would understandably be rather complex. So, as I was preparing this year’s tax organizer to bring to Rocco, my CPA, my daughter innocently asks, if taxes are so complicated why doesn’t someone just make them simpler?

Out of the mouths of babes.

I sat her down and told her it’s not as if no one has tried. In fact many have, but like calculating the value of Pi, it just keep going toward infinity.

Some years ago in my previous capacity helming Accounting Today I received a call from Washington inquiring if we would like to have a roundtable interview with then President George W. Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.  Their goal, although basic in definition – to make the tax code, simpler, fairer and conducive to economic growth - promised to be far harder in practice.  And despite months of compiling recommendations and subsequently submitting them to the Treasury Department, the plan wound up gathering dust in some overstocked Capitol Hill storage vault.

But back the present. The current occupant of the Oval Office has unveiled some sweeping tax changes in his 2016 budget including – yawn, raising taxes on the wealthy (here we go again) and the promise of tax cuts for the middle class.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Perhaps I can recoup all the money I lost in last week’s Super Bowl pool by taking odds that these proposals like others before them will be DOA.

Maybe if someone convinced a young Einstein back in the day that his future was in accounting and not physics, we’d have had “The Theory of the IRC.”