Don't Mess With Taxes

The size of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) has always been a popular, and contentious, topic.

The tax code's expansiveness, usually misconstrued or exaggerated by anti-taxers, regularly is cited as a reason to, among other things, eliminate many tax laws and/or abolish the Internal Revenue Service entirely.

But there's another extensive component to our tax system. Regulations.

Creation, then implementation: While Congress has the constitutional power to tax, the Treasury Department provides the official interpretation of those laws once they're in the IRC via IRS-issued regulations.

The regs, which are published in the Federal Register, are directions to us taxpayers (and tax pros) on how to comply with the tax code's requirements.

Like the tax laws themselves, IRS regs can be problematic.

Take, for example, the IRS' recent decision, cited in the Tweet below, on the federal taxation of state inflation relief payments.

Fewer regs in 2022: There is recent some good news when it comes to regulations, and their related IRS proposed rules and notices, executive orders, and the myriad other tax materials.

IRS regulations are at their lowest level in 24 years, according to Andrew Mitchel's International Tax Blog.

"From 1994 to 2022, the IRS published 13,916 documents in the Federal Register. The total number of pages published during this time was 42,903," writes Mitchel.

But the number of pages published in 2022 alone was the lowest it has been since 1997, note Mitchel. A quarter century ago, the IRS published 1,071 pages. Last year, the IRS published 1,097 pages in the Federal Register.

That news earns the 1,097 pages of regulations etc. this weekend's By the Numbers honor.

You also might find these items of interest:

• Tax code still ginormous, but growth has slowed a bit
• Treasury cites 8 burdensome tax regs that might be axed
• Treasury's answer to increasing crypto scams and fraud? More regulation

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