Lankford meets with IRS Commissioner on tax day

Senator James Lankford (R-OK) says the IRS tax code is long overdue for simplification, and he has some numbers to back up that contention.

He tells KRMG the tax code contains more than four million words, and has been amended more than 4,600 times in the last 12 years.

That, he says, is bad enough, but the addition of the Affordable Care Act on top of the tax code "has been a greater burden than anyone could possibly realize."

Ironically, Mr. Lankford spent a good amount of time on April 15th meeting with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

"I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning with the Commissioner of the IRS talking through a lot of tax code issues," the Senator told KRMG Wednesday. "It just happened to work out on his schedule and mine, and it ended up being ironic that it was tax day."

"A lot of these issues aren't just theoretical," he added. "I'm trying to sit down and actually work out how do we actually solve this so we stop talking about tax issues and we actually start fixing these tax issues."

"It was a very, very positive conversation. I want to walk into it with the perception that 'you and I aren't going to agree on everything, let's find the areas that we can actually fix and start moving on it.'"

Koskinen's subsequent conversation with lawmakers was perhaps more contentious.

He was trying to explain why only 40 percent of callers seeking help from the IRS on their taxes actually get through.

He also pointed to additional confusion caused by the Affordable Care Act.

The 2014 tax year is the first year the IRS had to enforce the individual mandate under the ACA, nicknamed "Obamacare."

He has also argued in the past that budget cuts have his agency stretched very thin.

Lankford told KRMG the budget cuts were deliberately punitive.

"They withheld documents and there were major problems with Lois Lerner," he said, "so in a bipartisan way we pushed back on the IRS and said 'you can't keep giving us excuses while you're not following the rules on this.'"

Of all the potential fixes for the tax code that have been floated, Lankford says he prefers the Fair Tax idea, but doesn't think there's enough support to make that happen.