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Without turning this into a debate on the merits of said income tax, can anyone here give me some direction on finding out the total cost of administering it? I'm coming up short on Google.
This would include the total IRS budget, but also all the money spent by private firms and individuals in terms of internal man-hours, accountants, forms, etc.
FWIW (nothing), my out-of-thin-air guess is $200B annually.
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What the Federal Tax System is Costing You
According to the quoted study, the cost of compliance in 2005 was $265B. The IRS budget is comparatively small at $10B.
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Phil153 posted a response to the OP that he deleted after he saw your post with actual numbers.
It went like this (I copied and pasted):
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200 billion is way too high in my opinion, probably ban order of magnitude. Here's a rough estimate:
Most employees wouldn't spend more than a couple of hours a year on tax, which accounts for around $8 billion at $20/hr.
For a rough idea of the corporate market, PricewaterhouseCoopers is the largest accounting firm in the world, 146,000 people in 150 countries, and their annual revenue is 20 billion. A fraction of that would be tax. Most larger firms and businesses maintain good records anyway (income, receipts, salaries), so you can't count that as a cost of tax. So, I'd estimate something like:
24 million US businesses filing tax returns at 50 hours/year each and $20/hr =~ $20 billion.
So I'd estimate between 10 and 30 billion are spent on tax each year or ~0.2% of US GDP.
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This is a real dick thing for me to do, but someone had to take one for the team here.