Alexandria, VA - The EVP of the American Conservative Union said today that despite news coverage on the new White House dog, the real dog in America is the IRS.

"The IRS has the ability to get to and fetch the money in your paycheck even before you can,"  said Dennis Whitfield, Executive Vice President of ACU.

"With mandated FICA and withholding taxes, America's employers play the role of the tax collector taking money from paychecks even before the pay reaches employees.  This helps hide the real costs of taxation.  With its complexity and costs for compliance, the IRS Tax code, like a dog, can eat you out of house and home and leave behind a mess," he added.

Today, the ACU is pointing out some of the most disturbing facts about our current tax code: 

1)  The U.S. Tax code has over 9 million words.

2)  The IRS now has over 100,000 government employees and it spends over $11 billion a      year in taxpayer dollars just to implement the code.

3)  A Government Accountability report said IRS employees gave incorrect information to         taxpayers almost 10% of the time over the last four years, with the complexity of the         code.

4)  According to the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy, complying with the       tax code costs all American businesses an average of almost $900 per employee.

5)  The IRS estimates Americans spend 6.6 billion hours per year filling out tax forms-              including 1.6 billion hours on the 1040 form alone.   The costs of these lost hours for            individuals and small businesses are staggering.

"It is too complicated, it taxes too much, it is too unwieldy especially in an economy that needs a break.  We need change and we need it now.  We need a smaller, simpler, fairer tax code," Whitfield said.

ACU also noted that as the liberals in Washington try to add pages and pages to the tax code in an effort to social engineer the economy, they are the ones struggling to pay their own taxes.  Obama's own Treasury Secretary - the man now responsible for running the IRS - has admitted to not paying over $30,000 in personal taxes on his own tax return.  Geithner called the errors "careless mistakes."  Former Democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who himself voted for numerous tax increases, was forced to withdraw from consideration to become Health and Human Services Secretary because he failed to pay more than $125,000 in taxes.

"Simply put the teeth of the IRS tax code chews away at the incomes of every American.  We cannot afford a tax code that costs billions to comply with and hurts every American business.   ACU believes we need to take the bite out of the U.S. Tax code," said Whitfield.

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The American Conservative Union (ACU) is the nation's largest and oldest grassroots conservative organization.  ACU is the recognized authority on rating the conservative votes in Congress through its annual congressional ratings cited by CQ, National Journal and almost all major national and regional publications.  The American Conservative Union's Foundation (ACUF) is the host of the CPAC meeting.  ACU is on the web at:  http://www.conservative.org/