Known unknown

By K.N.C.

AMERICANS filed their income taxes yesterday, swearing that “under penalties of perjury...to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are true, correct, and complete.”

Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that his return may be none of the above. Yesterday his office released (via Twitter) a letter to the Internal Revenue Service in which he says: “I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate.” (See below.)

“The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated, that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate,” Mr Rumsfeld wrote.

Mr Rumsfeld was wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but in this case he is clearly right. The American tax code is a "known unknown", in Rummiespeak. It is 70,000 pages long and might as well be written in Klingon. Few Americans have a clue whether they are complying with it. Some 90% of them (including Mr Rumsfeld) pay a tax accountant or use commercial software to help navigate it (see Economist articles here and here and here and here and here, among others). There are proposals to simplify the code (see article here). But don’t hold your breath.