detail over the next two weeks but we re working on it with congress now and coming up with very exacting numbers. but here are my four basic principles for tax reform. first, we need a tax code that is simple, fair and easy to understand. unlike what we have. [applause] our tax code has gotten ridiculously complex. this leaves to massive frustration, wasted time and wasted money. lots of wasted money. today the average taxpayer haas to wade through 241 pages of instructions to file a basic tax form. does anyone know that? 241 pages. a staggering 94% of the families need professional help to do their taxes. they have to get it, which is why the tax preparation industry generated $10 billion in
make a buck we re here to stay. to say that just because they don t put on a suit and go to work every day they don t have a real job or they don t need benefits like a real worker would is ridiculous. but all of this goodwill must come at a cost right? after all, san francisco is one of the most competitive restaurant markets in the world. a successful restaurant is profiting 5%. what do you guys do? closer to 22. 22%? on a good year. my accountant is going to kill me for telling you that. a recipe for success that has them all coming back for more. cynthia mcfadden, nbc news san francisco. john hewitt has made quite a name for himself in the tax preparation industry. the co-founder of jackson hewitt, a company for which he no longer works but still bears his name is the founder now and ceo of liberty tax service based in virginia beach, virginia. the third largest tax prep in
we re here to stay. to say that just because they don t put on a suit and go to work every day, they don t have a real job or they don t need benefits like a real worker would, is ridiculous. but all this goodwill must come at a cost right? after all, san francisco is one of the most competitive restaurant markets in the world. a successful restaurant is profiting 5%. what do you guys do? closer to 22%. 22% profit? on a good year. my accountant is going to kill me for telling you that. a recipe for success that has them all coming back for more. cynthia mcfadden, nbc news, san francisco. john hewitt has made quite a name for himself in the tax preparation industry. the cofunder for jackson hewitt a company which he no longer works but bears his name is the founder and ceo of liberty tax service based in virginia beach, virginia. now the third largest tax prep firm in the country, liberty has 4300 locations and continues to
the tax preparation industry now profits greatly from the poor. and one of the things is that we often think thart poor are marginal to our economy, but now that we have an upside down economy, where the 1% are drive everything else, we have increasingly more people who are qualifying as poor, and the economy is finding ways to make lots of money off of them. how do you make money, if you re a tax preparer, how do you make money off a poor person? you charge a poor person the same amount of fees as someone who makes $70, $80, $90,000 a year. how do you do that if they don t have money? often take it right out of the tax return. poor folks tend to be getting a big check from the government, relatively big to their income around the year. around tax time, there s this big pool of money and you say, sure, i will unlock that pool of money, i m going to take a toll. the fees aren t often disclosed up-front. and for a lot of these fees, they can be the equivalent for one out of $
the government in check. but does that argument add up? tom foreman s outfront with the story. reporter: americans spend billions of dollars and houring filing taxes, filling in the boxes, all the numbers. i don t want to make any mistakes. i feel like it s too tedious, a lot of numbers. reporter: and if you say this should be easier to any economist, like, say, joe bankman at stanford, he ll tell you that s absolutely right, tom. reporter: so why isn t it? because the business of tax preparation is huge. and virtually every attempt to simplify taxes in recent years has been beaten back in part by the tax preparation industry. by companies like the one that gave us turbo tax. used by 25 million americans. and if we could make the process easy for taxpayers, to simply file online themselves, it stands to reason that they d