[LethargicStud]

> Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited.

Does this mean 1/200 people get audited, or of the people who meet the conditions to be audited, only 1/200 of them will be audited? The article doesn't differentiate between whether people today should be audited but are not due to the systems in place, or perhaps that simply less people today meet the criteria to be audited and the computers are still doing their job just fine.

[Mtinie]

A good question. 145,070,000 tax returns were processed through September 2017[1]. If the rate was one return out of every two hundred, there would have been ~725,000 audits conducted.

Multiple sources I found online reported “just over 1 million audits were conducted in 2016” (~1/120) but the number was expected to go down in 2017 due to budgetary reasons.

It is reasonable to extrapolate this value and find it in line with the original “1/200 returns”, out of the total population of filed returns.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-we...

[jandrese]

What does it even mean to meet the criteria to be audited? I got a letter this year saying that my refund would take an extra 6-8 weeks due to some extra scrutiny on the IRSes part, but they never asked for the receipts or for me to come in so what happened?

As far as I know there wasn't anything especially fishy about my taxes. I did file early (first week of Feb) because we needed the refund, but that alone seems like a poor reason to audit someone's taxes.

I guess the other new thing was that they made me verify my address and bank account numbers to verify that I'm not some scammer trying to steal someone else's refund, but that made little sense because it is the same account I've had the refund deposited in for the past 18 years and my address has not changed in 9. All it did in the end was add an extra month and a half to the refund.