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The Internal Revenue Service’s preference for handling millionaires and billionaires with kid gloves has been known and documented for years.
But there’s another side of the coin: Where does the IRS really focus its enforcement firepower? On the poorest households in America.
The relevant statistics come to us via TRAC, a nonprofit research data center at Syracuse University. TRAC recently mined IRS statistics and determined that the agency audits households with less than $25,000 in income at a rate five times higher than anyone else.
The figures show that the lowest-income wage earners, defined as those eligible for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, were audited at a rate of 13 per 1,000 returns in 2021. For everyone else, the rate was 2.6 per 1,000 returns.
For married couples with no children, eligibility was capped for the current tax year at adjusted gross income of $22,610. The ceiling rises with family size, but the maximum income this year, for households with three or more children, is $53,057.
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