Wednesday, June 03, 2009
IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman claimed in testimony delivered to the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government on May 19 that audit rates for the wealthy have been steadily increasing. However, this testimony is contradicted by a study from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which found audit rates for the wealthy during same period to have significantly decreased.
The discrepancy appears to come down how one defines a person who is “wealthy.” For Shulman, that would be anyone who earns more than $200,000 a year. His figures show a 24% increase in audits for such individuals, as opposed to an 8% increase overall for audits conducted in the 2008 fiscal year, in comparison to the 2006 fiscal year. Shulman also cited higher audit coverage rates for corporations of all sizes.
TRAC’s figures are based on individuals with annual incomes of more than $1 million. Those individuals enjoyed a decline in their audit rate of between 19% and 35%.
-David Wallechinsky, Tyler Schenk-Wasson
IRS Audit Rates for Millionaires Plummet (Web CPA)
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