IRS Chief: "IRS Code Is Too Complex"

About $13.6 billion was given away--overpaid--by the IRS in refundable tax credits in 2012.  And there will be no real effort to collect it.

The reason?

...“Again on this particular question of improper refund papers – if you can indulge me – I think one of the causes of these improper payments orients around the complexity of the code and the complexity of the eligibility criteria,” Werfel said.

“If you look at, for example, the earned income tax credit, one of the things we look at in terms of to determine eligibility, is whether the individual has lived with their dependent child for more than six months or not. That’s one of the criteria. That is extremely difficult to validate. We don’t have a global childhood residency database. It’s very difficult to validate. When we go in and we check on things, we find mistakes,” he said....

Umnnhhhhhh....yah.

There is no little irony present here.  A Congresscritter assails IRS for over-paying credits.  Makes good TV, of course, but who wrote the damn fool 'complex' code in the first place?

This is no different from Congressional bitching over Apple's zero-tax-payment.  Congress wrote the code; Apple adhered to it, and as a result, paid no income taxes.  (Same with GE, by the way, in past years.)

The problem is not the IRS.  The problem is Congress and its Frankenstein Monster IRS Code.