The effort and expense it takes to file taxes is staggering at 8.1 billion man hours totaling $170 billion in lost time or –  what for the average working American amounts to a week of work preparing tax paper, according to a new Tax Day report.

The Washington Examiner has the details:

The report from American Action Forum considers the costs associated with all Internal Revenue Service forms, such as those corporations and doctors fill out, often for customers or patients, but it also breaks down the impact of tax season on individuals who face a Tuesday filing deadline.

“IRS currently imposes 8.1 billion hours of paperwork and generates more than 1,000 tax forms. To put these incredible burdens into perspective, that is 25 hours per person in the U.S. or 54 hours per taxpayer. In other words, the average working American spends more than a week sifting through paperwork and preparing to file,” said the report.

“What is the cost of all of this? According to the IRS, it’s $86 billion annually, but the agency only monetized a small fraction of its more-than-seven-hundred distinct paperwork collections. When assuming every hour of paperwork imposes some cost, the actual burden jumps to around $170 billion annually, which exceeds the gross domestic product of Kenya,” it added.

There’s a reason Americans don’t like Tax Day, chief among those reasons is the drain on time and resources filing taxes creates on the average, working, taxpaying American.  Click here to help Tea Party Patriots encourage our lawmakers to adopt a commonsense tax code that is simpler, flatter and fairer!