The IRS budget has been decreasing. As a result, they've been experiencing rates of attrition of their examiners, significantly higher attrition among the exami

The IRS budget has been decreasing. As a result, they've been experiencing rates of attrition of their examiners, significantly higher attrition among the examiners who can perform high income audits, which take longer, ranging "from 61 to 251 hours per return." The IRS cannot simply shift examination resources from single issue correspondence audits to more complex higher income audits because of employee experience and skillset. A GS-8 tax examiner is not trained to conduct a high-income, high wealth taxpayer audit. In order to increase parity of number of taxpayers audited, the IRS must reallocate high-graded resources from certain issues to high income, high wealth taxpayer returns. Further, the rate of attrition is significantly higher among these more experience examiners. It is also important to maintaining the voluntary compliance level that the IRS has an audit presence across all income groups, including EITC. In the short term, the IRS will continue to open additional audits in FY 2019 in the category of TPI of $10 million and over. [...] In the longer term, Congress must fund and the IRS must train appropriate numbers of RAs to have appropriately balanced coverage among all income levels. Further, he notes that "EITC correspondence audits are the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources with the average time to complete the audit about 5 hours of return." Although audits have been decreasing among all parts of the population, they've been decreasing more sharply for top earners. According to ProPublica, citing this document[1], audit rates have dropped by about 80% for all groups with an income of over $200k, and only 34% for EITC recipients; as a result, EITC recipients are now about equally likely to receive audits as top 1% income earners (1.41% vs 1.56%). So, due to their dwindling resources, the IRS is auditing all groups less, but they're particularly focusing on auditing low income and EITC recipients and less on high income earners. [1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6023996-Effects-of-EITC-Correspondence-Audits-on-Low.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6023996-Effects-of-E...