A typical federal tax filing for our household is over 100 pages long, and that’s just the stuff that we need to mail. The accompanying directions and worksheets are probably close to 1000 pages.
Also, lots of the directions are incredibly obfuscated once you start getting into those 1000 pages.
> If you do A and not B then you can do C.
> Example calculation of C (usually over a page long):
> Bob wants to do C but encountered corner case exceptions E and F in the absence of event G. That implies B, so here’s the arithmetic for doing D (which is covered elsewhere in this book, and is probably irrelevant to your situation).
This is just standard stuff TurboTax handles. God help people with filings too complicated for that!
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/
A typical federal tax filing for our household is over 100 pages long, and that’s just the stuff that we need to mail. The accompanying directions and worksheets are probably close to 1000 pages.
Also, lots of the directions are incredibly obfuscated once you start getting into those 1000 pages.
> If you do A and not B then you can do C.
> Example calculation of C (usually over a page long):
> Bob wants to do C but encountered corner case exceptions E and F in the absence of event G. That implies B, so here’s the arithmetic for doing D (which is covered elsewhere in this book, and is probably irrelevant to your situation).
This is just standard stuff TurboTax handles. God help people with filings too complicated for that!
(And, yes, I used to do taxes by hand.)