Is there A BETTER WAY to file our tax returns than wrestling with all those confusing forms we have to deal with now? Well, there just might be. Our Cover Story is reported by Chip Reid:

Stanford Law professor Joseph Bankman wants to make doing your taxes a lot easier. This year Americans will spend on average $100 and eight hours to make sense of our 1099s and W2s for our 1040s.

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Stanford Law professor Joseph Bankman wants to make doing your taxes a lot easier. This year Americans will spend on average $100 and eight hours to make sense of our 1099s and W2s for our 1040s.

It’s a task, he says, that is made nearly impossible. “Think of your credit card bill. What if Visa sent you a blank piece of paper each month and said, ‘Figure out all your purchases, keep track of them, and write them, so you had to save the receipts’?

“They don’t do that. The government shouldn’t.”

And if just thinking about the process makes your head hurt, well, that’s why Bankman wants a tax return that many Americans would only have to read, review, and sign.

Under his proposal, “The government takes all the information it’s already collected from your bank, your employer, your mortgage lender, and it takes those numbers and it puts that on the right line of a tax return that you could download or get in hard copy,” Bankman said, saving the average taxpayer “time and money and anxiety.”