Lowest-Income Taxpayers Are the Most Likely To Be Audited

IRS audits target the poor. Data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University shows the IRS audited the lowest-income Americans—”wage earners with less than $25,000 in total gross receipts”—at five times the rate of everyone else during government fiscal year 2021.

“A large increase in federal income tax audits targeting the poorest wage earners allowed the Internal Revenue Service to keep overall audit numbers from further declines for Americans as a whole,” TRAC reports.

It’s another sign that the Biden administration’s plan to beef up IRS funding, hire more than 80,000 new tax cops, and increase monitoring of cash flow into and out of bank accounts could harm the Americans who are just barely scraping by, not only ultra-wealthy tax cheats, as officials say.

In 2021, the IRS conducted 306,944 audits of the lowest-income earners and 352,059 audits of people of all other income levels, according to TRAC. Just 39,449 audits were of people with taxable incomes between $200,000 and $1 million per year.

Put another way, high-income earners had one-third the odds of an audit compared with their low-income counterparts. Only 4.5 out of every 1,000 returns of the $200,000-to-$1 million bracket were audited, compared to 13 out of every 1,000 returns of the lowest-income bracket. – READ MORE