Wrong. I peddle facts that professional “victims” hate to hear.

If you really believed what you say about lower income people being targeted by the IRS, you would go back to school so you could eventually join the ranks of the upper income earners who don’t get audited?

Just a thought.

LOL.

3% is three times more likely than 1%.

Now I see why you’re poor.

That’s a brilliant argument. I am entirely convinced and take back everything I said on the subject.

ROFL.

There isn’t much difference between 1% vs 3%. I hardly call that much more likely.

Its more like this article is the one trying to twist the truth around.

The use of the word “rare” is relative. The point, of course, is that a taxpayer is much more likely to be audited if he is rich.

But apparently it’s fun to pretend that the rich are getting handouts while the poor get screwed.

Untrue, but fun.

By the way, there is so much fraud and abuse with the Earned Income Tax Credit the IRS should be auditing more of these people.

Refundable credits breed abuse.

The National Taxpayer Advocate does not agree with your statement that such audits are rare.

If you visit the IRS statistics on returns selected for audits, you will see that the IRS audits half a million EITC taxpayers a year, and Rachel Porcaro (single mother of two kids earning a bit over minimum wage working fulltime) is very typical of the type of EITC taxpayer they audit.

(Theoretically, in 2007 a taxpayer could have claimed EITC with an income up to almost $40,000, but the amount of EITC would have been so small that it’s unlikely the IRS would have selected the return for audit.)

Low income taxpayers claiming “qualifying children,” as Rachel Porcaro did are more likely to be audited than any other income group with the exception of taxpayers earning over $200,000 per year.

The IRS audits those returns at a high rate because the rate of error and deliberate fraud (some of it perpetrated by unscrupulous paid preparers) on such returns is very high.

Unfortunately, under our current system, this is a burden for many innocent taxpayers who have the bad luck to be selected for audit. Nina Olson has conducted studies showing that many low-income taxpayers do not even attempt to contest the IRS challenges to their returns.

When they have representation, their odds of successful challenge are considerably higher, but, as a practical matter, the number of low income taxpayers that can be served by existing resources is a small fraction of those audited.