The low income (under 25k) with EITC, were the largest audited group with 298,485 of 626,204 audits performed in 2022. The rest of those earning under 200k had 250,391 audits.[]

48% of audits were under 25k income. 87% of audits were people under 200k income.

Kind of interferes with the idea these audits were all about going after the uber rich. They were way more about going after the poor than they were about going after the rich.

[] l IRS management audit reports obtained via FOIA by via TRAC / https://tracreports.org/reports/706/

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cake_robot 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The point of prior recent investments in tax police (that the GOP worked to claw back) was specifically to enable the enforcement of complex cases (rich people) that they didn't have the bandwidth to engage.

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jcranmer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The audits of people under that are going to fall under 2 or 3 categories:

a) People who filled in the wrong number on the spreadsheet that is taxes for whatever reason, and the audit is informing the filer that they filled it out incorrectly. I mean, really, taxes should start with the government sending me the form of what it thinks I owe and I should be making corrections to that, since the government already has this information and has done it, and that would make many of these audits go away.

b) People who misunderstood eligibility requirements and claimed deductions they weren't entitled to.

c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage.

	▲	mothballed an hour ago \| parent [-]
		>c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage. There's a sleight of hand in your argument here. I said under 25k with EITC. You can't get EITC if you're "claiming no income." That's why it's called earned income tax credit as the credit is intended to help offset welfare cliffs as you start to earn more money but at low incomes. So your whole paragraph here about <25k is null and void as "millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income" aren't in the <25k EITC bucket I mentioned, they're in the bucket of others earning under 200k. (As an aside, if someone actually thinks earns nothing and doesn't want EITC which they can't get anyway with zero income they probably won't even be filing, there is no "return" to audit.)

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justin66 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's super weird to believe auditing a normal person and auditing "the uber rich" is in any way comparable. In both cases the thing being done can be referred to as an "audit," but that's it.

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DFHippie 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you think gutting the IRS is going to improve that ratio?

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OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, $200k puts you well above the 90th percentile of earners in the US, so the IRS is (if only slightly) focusing extra resources on the wealthy. Audits go after people who have relatively obviously incorrect information on their taxes. For people under $25,000, there's a good chance they forgot a W2 or something, which means it's a quick identification and fix for the IRS.

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hsbauauvhabzb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How many of those <25k audits were completely automated? Going after the poor with an automated script at scale is basically free money for a government without compassion.

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OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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".

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trelane 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cheating on tax credits also comes to mind

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hsbauauvhabzb 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

‘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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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?