Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Green State Tax Evaluation

We have a client that files a tax return in 38 states. I was curious while preparing this 900+ page monster - which states require the wasting of the most paper in order to file a return? So when I finally got around to organizing the return for our files, I decided to actually count the number of pages per state.

This client has multiple shareholders, so the result might be slightly different if it were a company with fewer shareholders - since some states have you put all the shareholder information on one page and others have a separate page for each shareholder. And I don't believe that the amount of business activity in the state affects the size of the return too much - some of the biggest wasters were states in which there was little to no activity.

With those qualifiers in place, here are the results:

LEAST GREEN STATES

1. California (52 pages)

2. Massachusetts (38)

3. Indiana (35)

3. Kentucky (35)

5. Illinois (34)



MOST GREEN STATES

1. Georgia (6)

1. Texas (6)

3. Montana (7)

4. Maine (9)

4. New Mexico (9)

4. Tennessee (9)

2 comments:

Jodi said...

Go Texas!!!

Gretchen said...

Hmmm... so two of the biggest wasters of paper are two of the so-called "most liberal" states? Interesting...