One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead.

Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety:

> Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1.

The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!