In an average year, Americans pay about $140 Billion in taxes to the government. That’s enough money for every one of us 300 million or so persons to have our own personal island! But alas the government still cannot seem to keep its books balanced even with this astonishing number. Sometimes it seems like the government itself could stand to go through a rigorous commerical business audit, to find out what is going wrong.

But the government doesn’t operate with the same kind of personal finance, even though the could benefit from some budgeting assistance. There’s plenty of able business people that may be better suited to the job than politicians. Perhaps they could take some advice and ease the burden on millions of Americans.

Currently, of all tax payers reporting that they expect to owe taxes each year, about 40% say that they are not prepared to pay up. Is it because they don’t know how? With all the resources available online and plenty of information being made available on the tax preparation process through the internet, still only about one-fifth, or 21% of tax payers do so using online tools.

Perhaps that statistic about being unprepared makes sense, after all plenty of business practices are still conducted with pens, papers and calculators still, rather than in the digital space. A commerical business audit for instance, is still a process that involves digging through reams of physical files and documents rather than computers. The audit accounting services industry is still in a way a brick and mortar industry, in that the process involves hard copies and real files, rather than digital ones.

But maybe the small percentage of taxpayers using online tools, is due to the fact that access to these digital resources is still limited. Not everyone has a computer for instance, and it is easier for many to walk into an office with a file folder to get there taxes done. Accounting tax preparation, and physical accountant offices are still a thriving industry after all.

But the cost of accounting tax preparation may be inhibitive as well. Consider the fact that the average fee for a federal return, as processed by an accountant, is $273. That’s a significant amount of money for middle and lower class households struggling to pay bills.

Maybe the people staying away form tax preparation offices are afraid of what the professionals might tell them though. Just like a business that doesn’t want to undergo a commerical business audit, a John Taxpayer may not want to hear what the tax preparer will tell them.

Whatever the case, there a large number of folks out there who struggle with paying there taxes, both from a financial standpoint, and from a point of general preparedness, or willingness.