IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson gave us some idea of how audit targeting has changed in recent years (at washingtonpost.com, which requires free registration to view articles):
IRS figures show that 0.65 percent of all individual taxpayers — roughly one in 150 — were audited in , up from 0.57 percent the year before. The audit rate among taxpayers with incomes of $100,000 or more rose to 1.06 percent from 0.86 percent. In , by contrast, the overall audit rate for individuals was 1.67 percent, and that for high-income taxpayers was 3.21 percent.…
The agency also pointed to a more than 9 percent jump — to $35.5 billion — in money collected from taxpayers as a result of enforcement efforts. The amount had been nearly flat at about $32 billion for .
At the same time, Everson said, IRS surveys indicate that the number of Americans who “believe it is okay to cheat on their taxes,” had risen to 17 percent , from 11 percent in .…
Much of the recent rise in audits was among what the IRS calls correspondence audits, in which the agency writes a letter to a taxpayer asking him or her to justify something on the return, such as the amount of mortgage interest deducted. “Field” audits, in which the taxpayer meets face to face with an IRS employee, climbed slightly to 206,457 in from 205,134 . In , there were 761,850 field audits, according to agency figures.…
The IRS figures also noted a continuing upturn in the number of levies, liens and seizures — key collection tools whose use fell drastically in the wake of Senate Finance Committee hearings in that were highly critical of the agency and resulted in enactment of the reform law.
As with audits, though, all three remained far below levels of the . Seizures of taxpayer property declined the most: 399 compared with 10,449 in .
An Associated Press article adds:
