Anyone that starts off an article with that sentence is out of touch with reality.
(1) The current tax code is 70,000 pages long. Or, 80,000; or 100,000; or maybe 110,000. The fact is even the IRS doesn't know how many pages are in the actual tax code.
(2) Call the IRS and ask them a tax question. They'll give you and answer, and then they will tell you they cannot gurantee the answer is correct, and that having asked the IRS for help is no defense against filing an incorrect return.
In other words, if you do exactly what the IRS tells you, you can still have your life ruined financially, or worse even go to jail for filing an "incorrect" tax return.
70,000 pages; refusal to gurantee a correct answer; taxpayers going to jail for following IRS advice, none of that's complicated. Sure.
The old 1040-EZ Form is probably too complicated for some. But if you read beyond the first paragraph, I admitted that there are some complexities and pinpointed where they are. But the basic concept of taking gross income, subtracting some kind of standard deduction, subtracting a personal exemption and looking up the amount of tax on a table is not that freaking complex.
Most people mess up by forgetting part of their income, not because they can’t add, subtract, or comprehend what’s deductible and what’s not.