Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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How many man-years were spent on this case between everyone involved?
The saddest tragedy of the IRS is how it wastes such a massive amount of everyone's time on an activity that is among the most painful and boring possible.
After ditching several accountants for making mistakes, I do my own taxes now. My business is much simpler than this car dealer's. And yet, I spend on the order of 50-100 hours a year on taxes and other government bullshit. I hate every moment of it.
It boggles my mind that there are people, millions of people, who do this full time. What a horrible waste.
The negative externalities of our tax system are enormous. Imagine if the government forced everyone in the country to sit in a dentist's chair getting their teeth picked at for 10-20 hours a year. That's the level of pain we're talking about here.
fwiw, blame Congress (and the tax preparation industry), not the IRS. The IRS has asked Congress for years to simplify the tax code (and made suggestions about how it could be done). Congress chooses to make it complex, and guess which industry is opposed to making it less so?
I haven't read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs so I don't know if this is what he had in mind, but at least in my head canon the US tax preparation industry is certainly up there when it comes to bullshit jobs.
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I do this full time (don't worry, it's not too bad, it's only endless pain and suffering) and I endorse the sentiment in your comment wholeheartedly. Ideally tax should be easy, but it's prone to accrete over time and increase in complexity as politicians play political football, and in addition there are a massive amount of anti-evasion mechanisms in the tax code in order to try and cover up every loophole as they're discovered, like trying to plug a pipe that keeps springing leaks. The legislation inevitably becomes an unwieldy, incoherent mess that most people would give their left testicle never to look at again.
In addition, tax collectors' incentives are so ridiculously misaligned with that of the rest of the public that it's often farcical. Their leniency or harshness is highly dependent on their revenue collection targets at any given point, their audits can be capricious and arbitrary, and in cases of conflict between the tax office and a business (I have actually seen this before) they'll try to wear said business out through attrition and limit the avenues for appeal. Contesting them in court is difficult because they have a practically endless reserve of public money to fight you, and if you're a small business lacking knowledge of the intricacies of taxation law and accounting, your best course of action is to submit to the terms of the tax office. The whole thing is fucked beyond belief.
If you haven't read The Pale King, it may be consoling. Or infuriating, it could go either way.
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As I understand it, one problem is that in our modern, (relatively) light touch economy*, fiddling with tax incentives is one of the government’s favourite ways to incentivise or disincentive things. Want to incentivise children? Then why not say that people have to pay 20% less VAT on a car purchase when they provide proof they’ve bought a child seat (so as not to be seen unfairly penalising the childless). Or the endless bickering about charitable offsets. Half the loopholes are there on purpose and the other half arise from the constant attempts to give out pork.
*As opposed to medieval monarchies or autocracies where people are comfortable giving orders.
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