> On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.
The problem is that these require a tremendous amount of research and expertise. You can't just throw some low-level employees at them and hope they'll figure it out.
We have the same thing in Germany where very successful auditors (their biggest hit was them investigating a major bank which lead to about 1bn euros of evaded taxes getting collected) got removed from their posts, forced into early retirement and declared insane (literally). Corrupt politicians and their rich clients considered them a nuisance and made them go away.
It's quite obvious what kind of signal that sends to anyone in tax auditing: if you want to live your life peacefully, don't go after the highly criminal high-value targets.
Yes, but you might only have to do it occasionally to have it pay off. Just enough that the dozen or so people at the top would think twice, because especially with the IRS bounty system, it may not take more than o e person with cold feet to either stop the fraud, or whistle blow and make prosecution much easier.
Although it would help significantly if corporate tax returns were public as originally intended. That's a bit like open sourcing the data, and you could have a bug bounty on finding issues.
> On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...