Filing fee.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Data - Brief article

How is a mugger different from the Internal Revenue Service? Both take your money, but the mugger doesn't make you fill out forms.

Every year the Tax Foundation calculates the cost of this added indignity. Since it's hard to put a dollar figure on annoyance and anxiety, the D.C.-based think tank sticks to estimating the time involved in keeping records and completing returns: some 6 billion hours in 2005. It multiplies these hours by the average hourly compensation for professional tax preparers or, for the share of taxpayers who file their own returns, the average hourly compensation for U.S. workers. The resulting figure represents the cost...