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The statement

"The Internal Revenue code has ballooned to a 5,600-page, 4 million-word complicated mess that is seven times as long as the Bible with none of the good news."

Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., in a press release

The ruling

A 2010 report by the Internal Revenue Service's Taxpayer's Advocate Office found that the tax code contained 3.8 million words. That calculation was made by downloading a zip file of the code, unzipping it and running it through Microsoft Word's word-count feature, according to a footnote in the report. A 2012 version of the report puts the number of words in the code at "about 4 million."

We also reached out to CCH, the Riverwoods, Ill., publisher of the two-volume 2013 Winter version of the tax code and was told the best estimate of word length was 4 million.

So Lance's claim about the number of words is generally accurate.

Next, let's look at number of pages. Lance said 5,600, based on the same figure cited by articles in the Washington Post, the Harvard Business Review and other publications, according to Todd Mitchell, Lance's chief of staff.

Mark Luscombe, a principal federal tax analyst for CCH, said the publisher's version of the tax code is 5,036 pages.

"Private publishers do a print version of the Internal Revenue code, but then you're looking at one private publisher's version of the code," he said. "We do it in two volumes and we keep condensing it."

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PolitiFact: Yes, tax code is long and complex