Taxing Taxes

In what's become something of a tax day journalistic tradition, USA Today sends a fictitious family's taxes to several different accountants and gets back four very different returns.

The problem of course is the 67,000-page tax code, and its various vague deductions aimed at manipulating behavior. Preparation of individual tax returns alone is estimated to be a $5 billion industry. That's $5 billion Americans are burning merely to comply wih the law. And that's not even touching what corporations pay.