Tax Foundation: 'Avoiding Tax Reform is No Longer an Option'

By Cathy Burke
Monday, 27 Mar 2017 05:21 PM

Taxpayers spend 6.1 billion hours a year — at a cost of $234 billion in direct costs and lost productivity — to comply with the federal tax code, according to the president of the conservative National Taxpayers Union.

At an event Monday held by the tax research group Tax Foundation, NTU president Pete Sepp said avoiding tax reform is no longer an option, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

"The problem is the status quo — thinking that, well, if we don't do tax reform this year it will just be that bad," Sepp said, the Free Beacon reported. "No, the status quo is not the static quo — it's going to get worse."

"The paperwork burden inventory at the Office of Management and Budget related to Treasury is expected to rise by another 2 billion hours in the next few years," he added. "One-third added to that, we're looking at tax compliance costs of north of $400 billion a year."

The failure of the Republicans to push through health care reform makes tax reform harder, however, according to Sepp.

"This is the important point right now, it's an especially important one in this current post-Obamacare repeal environment," he said, the Free Beacon reported. "We now have about a trillion dollars of baseline problem now that we didn't think we would have before assuming Obamacare was going to be repealed."

"That's going to make tax reform a much tougher task. It also means we're going to have to find other ways of making every single simplification measure count, more so than it ever would have needed to count in the past."

Treasury Secretary Steven has said he's overseeing work on the Trump administration's bill over the past two months — and that it'd be introduced soon in one proposal covering both cuts in individual and corporate taxes.

http://www.newsmax.com/US/tax-founda.../27/id/781024/