Maybe We’re Being Told Something

Daschle, Geitner, Solis, Killefer, Richardson, and who knows who else are being skewered on tax problems. The gloating from the right is echoing through the corridors of Washington. See, they point, how hypocritical these tax-and-spend folks are? It has happened before. It happened in the Clinton administration. It has happened in state and local government as well. Hell, it was the Achilles heel of Al Capone!

With two months to go until this year’s day of reckoning, it might do well to consider what this is telling us. Think about it honestly, not through a partisan lens.

You pay taxes. Unless you are in the fortunate demographic of the poverty stricken, you find yourself each year with an increasingly complex return. You take all of the documentation of your personal life down to H & R Block, or your accountant and bare your soul on his desk. A total stranger now knows your deepest financial secrets. Or, you buy a tax-prep software package and work your way laboriously through the “interview” until you finally get the generally bad news. You then go back and rework trying to minimize the damage. In the end, you give up and click “send” followed by a check in the mail and crossed fingers for the rest of the year.

You want to do what is right, but you don’t want to be stupid. You want to pay what you rightly owe, but not a penny more. You pick up the phone and call the IRS to check on a deduction. The bureaucrat says no. You hang up and weep. On a whim, you call back and ask the same question again to another agent. He says, of course that’s good. You take his answer.

Would you want your returns scrutinized the way these political figures are having done? Of course not. Are you confident that your return could withstand any scrutiny at all? I doubt it.

The fact is that our tax system has gotten so convoluted and so riddled with loop-holes, exceptions, reversals and confusion that all of us are inadvertently criminals without intent.

Take no joy in the discrediting of Obama’s appointees. It could happen to any one of us. Consider rather that there is a lesson to be learned. There is something deeply flawed about a system of law that effects every single citizen which is so confusing that anybody could be a violator without knowing it. When the annual requirement has gotten so convoluted that the only thing we hope for each year is that we aren’t among the slightly less than 10% that get audited. We know we are probably wrong. We did the best we could. But that’s not good enough.

Will someone notice this lesson from all of this?