Taxes Cost More Than What We Pay

Taxes Cost More Than What We Pay | Economics21
That is not the true cost—to either individuals, businesses or society at large. 
Time is money. 
Americans spend about 6.1 billion hours and $224.3 billion a year—$90.3 billion of it by  individuals—to comply with the filing requirements of the tax code, according to the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate. 
(Yes, you have an advocate at the IRS!) 
Those statistics don't include the opportunity cost, or the benefit the public would have received from devoting resources to some alternative activity.

So complex are the tax code and the myriad of IRS forms that about 60 percent of individual taxpayers pay someone else to prepare their tax returns.
An additional 29 percent rely on tax preparation software.
In other words, we have to pay (someone else) to pay (the IRS).