Last Wednesday was a day of dread for those Americans making their tax payment to Uncle Sam.

Although an estimated three-fourths of 150 million returns the IRS will process are expected to qualify for refunds, taxes remain a major irritant to most of us.According to a new Pew Research poll, 59 percent of American taxpayers believe that "there is so much wrong with the federal tax system that Congress should completely change it."Presidential candidates, mostly on the Republican side, will make tax reform one of their hot button issues in the 2016 campaign. Since this was the first tax season that Americans had to deal with the complicated health care law and the tax system, there is new momentum for simplifying the process.Thanks in great part to the new health care law, the number of pages in the U.S. Tax Code has ballooned to just under 74,000 pages.Averaging five minutes per page and spending eight hours a day, seven days a week, it would take you more than two years to read the complete code.Predictably, the Pew poll found that 72 percent of taxpayers say they're a little bit, or even "a lot," bothered by America's tax system.The amount of fraud within the federal system is disgusting.In one major flub, government sent an average of $120 million in retirement and disability payments to deceased former federal employees every year for at least the past five years.One report by the Inspector General for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that the amount of post-death improper payments is consistently $100-$150 million annually.That included an annuitant's son who kept cashing his dead father's checks for 37 years. That one scheme alone cost taxpayers more than $500,000.As if the Internal Revenue Service system needed any more reasons to arouse public scorn, a Wasteful Spending List for the federal government posted on Florida Congressman Bill Posey' website shows that the IRS issued more than $1 billion in bogus refund payments to individuals.The IRS can't even police its own people when it comes to unpaid taxes.IRS data from 2009 alone showed nearly 100,000 federal civilian employees owed $1.03 billion in unpaid federal income taxes and since that year, the amount owed has increased by nearly 70 percent.To combat IRS cheating from within, the U.S. House passed H.R. 828 in 2012 which would make any person with seriously delinquent tax debt ineligible for federal employment or to continue serving as a federal employee.It may seem like a drop in the Washington bureaucracy bucket but it costs the IRS $862,000 annually to store a total of 22,486 items of unused furniture. Because of the spendaholics handling our taxpayer money, we hope to see more than surplus furniture going out the door on election day.By JIM ZBICKeditor@tnonline.com