TRAC-Reports
IRS Cutbacks Result in Billions in Lost Revenue
(15 Mar 2016) IRS attention to auditing very large and giant corporations has plummeted from FY 2010 through the first five months of FY 2016. This is a consequence of Congress's continued sharp cuts in IRS budgets, according to a new analysis of agency records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. The likely result: even steeper reductions in government revenues.

Among the Key Findings:

* Revenue agent hours aimed at corporations with $250 million or more in assets in the period from FY 2010 through FY 2015 period have declined by more than a third (34%), while unreported taxes uncovered by IRS that would otherwise have been lost to the government dropped by almost two thirds (64%).

* Declines were even sharper for the giants of the business world -- those with $20 billion or more in assets.

* Even more recent data through February of 2016 indicate that business audits of large companies are running 22 percent lower this year than for the same period last year.

* As a result, the potential loss to the government now amounts to $15 billion or more a year.

This report on IRS audit and collection practices is the latest in a series of such special studies that have been posted on TRAC's IRS website since March 1997. For more details, see the full report at:

http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/416/
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http://trac.syr.edu/sponsor/

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