I really wish they would quit calling the simple these-numbers-don't-match correspondence things "audits". It gives a very different picture to what's happenin

I really wish they would quit calling the simple these-numbers-don't-match correspondence things "audits". It gives a very different picture to what's happening. Yeah, if you're poor you're a lot more likely to be doing your taxes by hand and thus you have much more room to make a copied-the-number-wrong mistake. Hence a high rate of "audits" in lower incomes. There's also more room to misunderstand something and enter wrong numbers. Separate them out based on whether it's just a letter kicked out by the computer and the taxpayer easily remedies whatever the computer was complaining about vs cases where the IRS is actually hunting for wrongdoing (say, unreported income from a cash-heavy small business.) I do agree, however, they need to target those with more. It's a lot harder so they tend not to and that has become much more severe because the Republicans have been deliberately starving them, they don't have the resources to do much of any actual auditing, it's almost all just these-numbers-don't-agree letters from the computer.