Tax day is right around the corner and if you haven’t finished them yet, you need to file an IRS extension form. Anyone that’s ever tried doing their own taxes knows how complicated it can be. As it turns out, there are 3.7 million words in the many thousands of pages in our tax code.

I discovered this quirky fact the other day after reading a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Cooper (see We Still Need a Simpler Tax Code). Naturally, I started thinking:

How long would it take too read the entire U.S. tax code?

• It would take 13 days (308.33 hours) of non-stop reading

This assumes the person is reading 200 words per minute (wpm) – the average reading speed. This also assumes the person reads the entire time and does not slow down, which is a little unrealistic.

Let’s assume that it is your sole job to be informed about the U.S. tax code. If you read 8 hours per day (9am-5pm), Monday-Friday, and you started your reading voyage on April 15, you would not finish until June 4. It would take 38.5 days of work to do this.

So that’s what accountants do in the off-season.

By the way… if you accomplish this feat, you deserve something more than a CPA. Maybe an official designation as Tax Czar or Tax Oracle. At the very least you should get a certificate of some sort to hang on you fridge.

President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus was passed by the House on Friday. Now I’m no politician, but how are all the members of the House supposed to read the 1,071 pages of the bill? That’s an 8-inch paper stack (sorry tree).

So how long would it take the average person to read the economic stimulus? First we need to know the average reading speed, which is 200 words per minute (wpm). Now we just need to know how many words are in the document.

This is a long, tedious process that you probably shouldn’t do. So I took the liberty of doing it for you (you’re welcome).

There are 207,421 words in the economic stimulus bill.

The average person, reading at 200 wpm would take 17 hours and 17 minutes to read the entire bill (without blinking or bathroom breaks).

You can see the latest updates on the stimulus package on the following website: ReadTheStimulus.org.