> A large increase in federal income tax audits targeting the poorest wage earners allowed the Internal Revenue Service to keep overall audit numbers from further declines for Americans as a whole during FY 2021.
I'm guessing low-income people are, for a bunch of reasons including having simpler finances and ~no ability to hire legal counsel or other outside help, way cheaper to audit than those with more money are.
This passage suggests they shifted focus there to keep their total-audits number from dropping even further. The IRS is experiencing a many-years-long deliberately-inflicted severe staffing shortage. IOW this was probably done to keep a metric someone cared about from dropping without requiring more funding, not because it's efficient or just or anything like that.
I might be missing something here, but are you disregarding the 80bn the IRS just got for another 87,000 auditors? Or are we talking funding for something else?
The 87,000 additional auditors is a misleading interpretation [1]
Summary:
- IRS used to have over 100,000 employees a decade back. This number has fallen due to funding cuts etc to less than 78,000 today.
- The employees are not just auditors - they are support people for tax filing, IT etc.
- There will be further employee attrition over the next decade that would need to be backfilled.
- What Congress has given them is funding to cover hiring of 87,000 employees over the next decade. This will cover backfill for employee attrition + new employees that will include auditors, enhanced support, IT etc. The total growth (again over the next decade) is expected to be 20-30,000 with will bring the IRS back to last decade levels.
TL;DR: IRS isn't going out and hiring 87,000 new (and in some misleading reports, gun toting) agents tomorrow and doubling their workforce. Instead, they are bringing their employee count (auditors and others) back to last decade levels and also replacing departing employees.
I'll take that wager- the IRS will audit you back what six years if they want to?
The smart money says a government that's 24 trillion in debt, beholden to a private central bank that printed 16 trillion to keep alive a fake economy in the face of a flu, will probably up its FY 2021 audit rate.
I'll check back with you in a few years to see how I did ;)
Acting like this dog shit house, senate, and president won't pass this is disingenuous. Your government wants to do nothing but take from you, the money is got.
> IRS accomplished over 650 thousand audits last year by jacking up its already high reliance on so called “correspondence audits” – essentially a letter from the IRS asking for documentation on a specific line item on a return.
I mean the reality is they can fine the poor however much they want and the poor can't afford lawyers. Fining rich people doesn't pay because they'll lawyer up. Reality.
> A large increase in federal income tax audits targeting the poorest wage earners allowed the Internal Revenue Service to keep overall audit numbers from further declines for Americans as a whole during FY 2021.
I'm guessing low-income people are, for a bunch of reasons including having simpler finances and ~no ability to hire legal counsel or other outside help, way cheaper to audit than those with more money are.
This passage suggests they shifted focus there to keep their total-audits number from dropping even further. The IRS is experiencing a many-years-long deliberately-inflicted severe staffing shortage. IOW this was probably done to keep a metric someone cared about from dropping without requiring more funding, not because it's efficient or just or anything like that.