In an American Action Forum tracker update, Director of Regulatory Policy Dan Goldbeck records the cost of complying with Internal Revenue Service paperwork using data on Information Collection Requirements from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ RegInfo.gov website. For this edition of the tracker, data as of April 12, 2024, is compared to the snapshot of costs compiled annually by AAF on Tax Days going back to 2017.

An excerpt:

For those that have been procrastinating on filing their tax returns, you can find solace in knowing that the IRS has also apparently waited until right before the usual April 15 deadline to duly file updated records on their paperwork requirements. Thanks primarily to a single ICR clearing OIRA’s paperwork review process on April 11, Tax Day 2024 will see a tax compliance cost total pushing nearly $300 billion – far and away the highest level AAF has recorded since 2017. The increase from this one ICR also puts the overall annual IRS paperwork burden title back up around eight billion hours, the level it largely hovered at between 2017 and 2020.

Read the analysis