Our mistake, but you pay

The Earned Income Tax Credit promised to be a great boon for the working poor, the very people who most deserved a helping hand. Yet many of them don't take advantage of it. The reason is that it is way too complicated.

"It's so complex that the IRS publishes more than 50 pages of instructions," writes Prof. Dorothy Brown of the Washington & Lee University School of Law in a New York Times op-ed. "It is so complex that a Government Accountability Office report showed that taxpayers, tax return preparers, and IRS staff members regularly made mistakes while calculating and administering it."

Congress has attempted to deal with the problem by pressing the IRS to audit more low-income returns. The result is that a disproportionate amount of the IRS audit effort has gone to taxpayers who, even squeezed to the maximum, can offer little more to the treasury when the obvious targets of the auditors should be rich cheats from whom the take could be substantial.

Instead of auditing the poor, the obvious solution is for Congress to simplify the law and restore the credit to what Prof. Brown describes as its original purpose--"rewarding the poor for working, not penalizing them for being poor."

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