Putting TRAC to Work
  Legal and Scholarly
The National Law Review
July 8, 2016

Some Questions Posed by Declining Audit Rates and Audit Campaigns
By Todd Welty, P.C.


The IRS is spending increasingly less time auditing large companies. This is a good thing, right? But wait, the IRS is starting to launch audit campaigns. And some large taxpayers are still being audited even if they are not caught up in a campaign. What could be some of the consequences of these dynamics? A recent report confirmed that IRS audits of large companies have fallen steeply in recent years. The report conducted by TRAC (Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, available here analyzed IRS audit history of large companies from 2010 through 2015. The study found the IRS spent 34 percent less time on average auditing companies with $250 million or more in assets (Big Corps) in 2015 than it did in 2010. Audits of the largest companies are declining even more sharply: the IRS spent 47 percent less time auditing companies with assets of $20 billion or more (Giant Corps). Further, the total number of large businesses audited by the IRS’s LB&I (Large Business & International) Division in 2016 is 22 percent lower than it was last year during this time period.


Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
Copyright 2016
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