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> The IRS is the most bang for the buck government department. Every dollar spent there nets out many more, because they're chronically under-resourced to audit

> The IRS is the most bang for the buck government department. Every dollar spent there nets out many more, because they're chronically under-resourced to audit the whales who can trivially hide their tax obligations. This is just a trope. Auditing big whales is often not the most efficient use of resources because their taxes are a) much more complicated, and so more expensive to audit and b) more likely to have been done by a team of competent lawyers, so even though they're engaged in all kinds of shenanigans, the shenanigans are legal and there is no money to be had by auditing them. Where the IRS can "turn a profit" is by auditing small and medium businesses, because they're more likely to have screwed up, and auditing them is cheap to the IRS. But this has a different problem. It isn't cheap to the taxpayer being audited; they pay an order of magnitude more to go through the audit than the IRS does. And then most of them are innocent, even though the IRS makes it back from the few that aren't. For obvious reasons the innocent ones hate this with the fire of a thousand suns, because nobody compensates them for their costs even though they did nothing wrong. But if you actually did compensate them for their costs then it wouldn't be net-positive for the IRS to do all those audits.

mullingitover 2y ago
> This is just a trope. Do you have citations to back up this assertion? The GAO seems to say otherwise[1]. [1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106112 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106112
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's saying the same thing: > GAO found that, as income increased, IRS recommended more taxes per audit, on average, but generally closed fewer audits. They close fewer audits because the audits require more resources (and partially because there are fewer of those taxpayers). Meanwhile the other effect also shows up clearly in their numbers: Average additional tax for the $500k-1M group (midpoint $750k) was ~$20k or 2.67%, for $1M-5M (midpoint 3M) was ~$40k or 1.33%, for $5M-10M (midpoint 7.5M) was ~$86k or 1.15%. Percentage for the top group is unknown because that bracket is open-ended, but $360k for the group that contains billionaires is likely to continue the trend. They get less as a percentage from the people with better tax lawyers. It's more in absolute dollars because by definition they have more money, but since it also costs more to audit them it's not necessarily worth it. Notice also that these are heuristics and the actual numbers change with the number of audits. There are going to be some people who are obviously cheating on their taxes, e.g. someone else filed a 1099 or W-2 for paying them and then they filed a return that didn't include the income. The IRS is going to put them at the front of the list to be audited and then that audit is going to show a positive recovery for the IRS. The more audits you do, the lower the recovery rate gets, because you started with the ones with huge obvious problems and doing more audits means auditing people who are more likely to be innocent. This is also why the "bang for the buck" calculation is pretty meaningless. Suppose there is one person you can audit for $2000 and then recover a million dollars (+$998,000), and then an unlimited number of people you could audit for $1000 and recover an average of $800 (-$200). If you do one audit of the one who is obviously cheating, you've recovered 500 times more than you put in! Clearly you should keep going. If you audit 100 people, you've spent $101,000 and recovered $1.08M, that's still almost ten times more than you spent! Clearly you should keep going? Except that only one of them was net positive and the additional audits have actually reduced your net gain from $998k to $978k while auditing a significant number of innocent people. What matters is the incremental returns from additional audits, not the average returns from existing audits. And taking into account as a cost the burden of auditing innocent people.
throw0101d 2y ago
> Auditing big whales is often not the most efficient use of resources because their taxes are a) much more complicated, and so more expensive to audit and b) more likely to have been done by a team of competent lawyers, so even though they're engaged in all kinds of shenanigans, the shenanigans are legal and there is no money to be had by auditing them. For "x" hours of work, the big whales can also potentially bring in a lot more money than a bunch of small minnows. Before it got a funding bump, the IRS went after minnows because of resource constraints: > Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to. * https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > For "x" hours of work, the big whales can also potentially bring in a lot more money than a bunch of small minnows. Your article says the opposite: > They [audits of low income people taking the EITC] are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says. They can either hire a lot of cheap low-level examiners to quickly audit a lot of low-income people or a smaller number of expensive examiners to slowly audit big complex returns that are more likely to be correct but have more at stake. They were doing the first one because it recovers more money per enforcement dollar. You can decide that your priority is "audit more rich people" rather than "recover the most money" but that doesn't make them the same thing, or make the first one the only or even default thing they'll do if you give them more enforcement resources.

mullingitover 2y ago

> This is just a trope. Do you have citations to back up this assertion? The GAO seems to say otherwise[1]. [1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106112 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106112

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's saying the same thing: > GAO found that, as income increased, IRS recommended more taxes per audit, on average, but generally closed fewer audits. They close fewer audits because the audits require more resources (and partially because there are fewer of those taxpayers). Meanwhile the other effect also shows up clearly in their numbers: Average additional tax for the $500k-1M group (midpoint $750k) was ~$20k or 2.67%, for $1M-5M (midpoint 3M) was ~$40k or 1.33%, for $5M-10M (midpoint 7.5M) was ~$86k or 1.15%. Percentage for the top group is unknown because that bracket is open-ended, but $360k for the group that contains billionaires is likely to continue the trend. They get less as a percentage from the people with better tax lawyers. It's more in absolute dollars because by definition they have more money, but since it also costs more to audit them it's not necessarily worth it. Notice also that these are heuristics and the actual numbers change with the number of audits. There are going to be some people who are obviously cheating on their taxes, e.g. someone else filed a 1099 or W-2 for paying them and then they filed a return that didn't include the income. The IRS is going to put them at the front of the list to be audited and then that audit is going to show a positive recovery for the IRS. The more audits you do, the lower the recovery rate gets, because you started with the ones with huge obvious problems and doing more audits means auditing people who are more likely to be innocent. This is also why the "bang for the buck" calculation is pretty meaningless. Suppose there is one person you can audit for $2000 and then recover a million dollars (+$998,000), and then an unlimited number of people you could audit for $1000 and recover an average of $800 (-$200). If you do one audit of the one who is obviously cheating, you've recovered 500 times more than you put in! Clearly you should keep going. If you audit 100 people, you've spent $101,000 and recovered $1.08M, that's still almost ten times more than you spent! Clearly you should keep going? Except that only one of them was net positive and the additional audits have actually reduced your net gain from $998k to $978k while auditing a significant number of innocent people. What matters is the incremental returns from additional audits, not the average returns from existing audits. And taking into account as a cost the burden of auditing innocent people.

throw0101d 2y ago

> Auditing big whales is often not the most efficient use of resources because their taxes are a) much more complicated, and so more expensive to audit and b) more likely to have been done by a team of competent lawyers, so even though they're engaged in all kinds of shenanigans, the shenanigans are legal and there is no money to be had by auditing them. For "x" hours of work, the big whales can also potentially bring in a lot more money than a bunch of small minnows. Before it got a funding bump, the IRS went after minnows because of resource constraints: > Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to. * https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> For "x" hours of work, the big whales can also potentially bring in a lot more money than a bunch of small minnows. Your article says the opposite: > They [audits of low income people taking the EITC] are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says. They can either hire a lot of cheap low-level examiners to quickly audit a lot of low-income people or a smaller number of expensive examiners to slowly audit big complex returns that are more likely to be correct but have more at stake. They were doing the first one because it recovers more money per enforcement dollar. You can decide that your priority is "audit more rich people" rather than "recover the most money" but that doesn't make them the same thing, or make the first one the only or even default thing they'll do if you give them more enforcement resources.