In an update to an American Action Forum tracker, Director of Regulatory Policy Dan Bosch records the cost of complying with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) paperwork using data on Information Collection Reviews from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ RegInfo.gov website. For this edition of the tracker, data as of October 2022 is compared to the snapshot of costs annually compiled by AAF on Tax Days going back to 2017.

An excerpt:

An increase in the number of estimated responses from the Income Tax Return for Estates and Trusts drove most of the rise of total costs. New data led the IRS to expect an increase of more than 1 million responses from its previous estimate, an increase of more than 11 percent. Total costs associated with preparing the form swelled by $937 million as a result, to $12.2 billion annually. Another sizeable increase came from a greater number of expected submissions of applications for tax extensions, which caused its cost total to nearly triple, to $449.3 million.

Read the analysis