[OkayPhysicist]

It's not "going after" the poor. You have to be out-right negligent to end up with any penalty at all, and the penalties involved are relatively small (20% of how much extra you owed them anyway). The vast majority of these low-income audits consist of "hey, we know you made money X, you didn't report it on your taxes. Fix it".

[trelane]

Cheating on tax credits also comes to mind

[hsbauauvhabzb]

‘We know you’re trying to survive in your low income, but we want to extract more money from you so the billionaires don’t have to pay as much tax’

[mrguyorama]

I make above median wage in the US and pay like 13% income tax on average.

Poor people pay very little income tax, as is the entire point of a progressive set of tax brackets and a large standard deduction.

It is trivial to not do your taxes wrong if you have legal employment. If you for some reason doubt your ability to do a couple calculations and copy over 6 numbers to a simple form, Turbotax will do that "hard work" for you for $30.

Even using Turbotax, I once failed to report a W2 (because I technically had more than one job) and the "penalty" was a letter that said "Hi, you missed this, we fixed it, give us $270 + $1 interest", which I never responded to because I am disordered, so they took my state income tax return.

No court. No threat. No serious penalty. I didn't even have to talk to anyone.

If we are talking about poor people, who by definition have minimal income, how do you think they supposedly would get hit by some giant IRS penalty? What is the magical pathway?