Rod Grams: “when 2,000 American job providers came to Washington last June to attend what was called the Third White House…”

“when 2,000 American job providers came to Washington last June to attend what was called the Third White House Conference on Small Business, they brought with them hundreds of ideas on how to make Government more responsive--to the taxpayers and to small business alike. They condensed their suggestions into a list of 60 to send on to the White House. Even though their recommendations covered a tremendous range of concerns, one point generated near universal agreement from that conference, and that was that something must be done about the complex and costly Federal tax system. Well, there's nothing simple about taxes anymore, as you have heard here today. As any taxpayer will tell you, the IRS today is five times bigger than the FBI, and it's twice as large as the CIA. To run such a massive operation takes the equivalent of more than 3 million full-time employees. We have more Americans collecting taxes than we have serving in the Armed Forces. The IRS manages a library of 437 separate tax forms. The IRS mails out over 8 billion pages of tax instructions every year. Now, our colleague in the House, the distinguished majority leader from Texas, points out that American workers and businesses spent 5.4 billion hours in 1990 just preparing their taxes. That is more time than it takes to build every car, truck, and van that is manufactured in the United States every year. Just to administer a tax system so unwieldy costs our taxpayers almost $14 billion a year.”