This article in the Washington Times shows that laws to make accounting 100 percent accurate may not be as easy as all that.

Part of the problem is the IRS insisting that taxes be paid as soon as possible on everything. If you are self-employed, like I am, you don't just pay all your taxes on April 15 after tallying up the year's income. You need to pay them approximately quarterly. The amount, of course, is based on your bracket, which is based on what the end-of-the-year total is. So, I need to tell the IRS what I am going to make in all of 2002 sometime in April. Businesses are in the same boat.

I am currently working on a contract that pays a predictable amount of money, so I can estimate my taxes quite accurately, but this is rare for self-employed people or businesses.

There have been many times when the work fluctuated greatly, and the best I could give the IRS was a wild-assed guess as to what I was going to make that year. Of course, the guesses got more accurate with each quarter, and it all evened up by April 15, but in between I was giving out only a guess as to what my earnings would be. Did this make me a crook or a liar if the real earnings turned out to be different?

I would venture to say that few Senators and Congressmen do their own accounting, much less their own taxes. For sure damn few of them have ever had to run a real business.

One hopes they don't wind up simply tossing more monkeywrenches into the works trying to fix things.