Hero or villain? You tell me

Did you hear about the new Taxpayer Experience Office (TEO)? 

Well, you have now. 

The big question for me was, where did this begin? Not just the office but the experience. When did the experience of being a taxpayer begin? 

I know this has been eating you up as well, so I looked into it (and I now know who is to blame). 

It turns out the TEO is a long time coming.  

More on that in a second.

Key Updates

• Thinking about short-term rentals? Airbnb opened up the short-term rental market and created a whole new class of accessible income. It can be lucrative, but before you take the leap, be sure to do some planning. Here are three tips to avoid short-term rental tax traps. 
• Want to learn more about the Taxpayer Experience Office? Stories about irrigation and the invention of math are nice and all (as I explain below) but here is what the new experience office means to you.
• We are moving into graduation season; thinking about paying for college? If you know college expenses will be a part of your future, you might want to review this post on education tax benefits to help you save and even reduce college expenses. 

Taxes, as we understand them, started around 3000 BCE

Before then, people with weapons took what they wanted as they wandered around the countryside. But most people were nomadic anyway, so they had to bump into each other for the exchange to occur.

Then somebody had an idea. 

That person lived at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The soil was great but dry, and this person was tired of moving, so she (had to be a woman, you know they bore the brunt of moves 5000 years ago) dug a little trench and flooded the field with water. 

No more moving. 

Irrigation was born.

This was huge because suddenly moving was pasé; the cool kids were building houses and sticking around to water their plants. 

The farmers could produce a lot more food, which led to people building houses nearby, ditching farming, and moving into things like shovel making. 

This was all great except for one thing: those people wandering around with weapons didn’t have to wait for random chance anymore. They knew where the houses were.

King Hammurabi had the answer: bureaucracy.

Hammurabi created a bureaucracy that managed land ownership, rights, and disputes and a military that kept the wandering weaponized thieves at bay.

Creating bureaucracy was a lot harder than it sounds. It wasn’t just the lack of Excel that held them back: they were missing things like writing, time measurement, and math. 

Hammurabi’s team came up with a new style of writing (Cuneiform, think very complex letters that replaced even more complex hieroglyphics), the idea of hours, minutes, seconds, and math.

The tax was 20% of agricultural yield, so they had to figure out how to calculate yield and how to calculate 20%.  

For better or worse Hammurabi’s concept was a roaring success. The good part is we have a great writing system, math, and houses that we don't have to pack up and move every season.  

But there is still that one thing:  

The taxpayer experience was (and is) abysmal.  

So, five thousand years later, Congress realized that people were still very annoyed with the experience of tax collection, delayed refunds, and spending hours on the phone for every request.  

Now we have the Taxpayer Experience Office, an effort by Congress and the IRS to at least make the experience of paying taxes a little better than it has been for the last 5000 years.

I am not holding my breath, but any improvement would be nice because one thing is for sure:

Taxes will continue.

From Around the Web

If you want to read more about the Taxpayer Experience Office, directly from the source, here is a link to the IRS. And if you want to read more about Hammurabi's approach to taxes you can find more about that here. The IRS may be more relevant... Hammurabi is more interesting.

Irrigation is also an interesting topic. I am not a historian, but from what I've read the importance of irrigation is hard to overstate. First, it was buckets, then canals, now sprinklers and drip systems. Read more about the history of irrigation here.