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Americans who have put off their 2021 taxes have less than a week to file a return or an extension — and fill them out accurately to avoid trouble from the Internal Revenue Service.
Audits are a risk that all should heed, but especially the lowest-income earners. The IRS looked at their returns at a rate five times greater than all other taxpayers in the 2021 fiscal year, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
The chances of being targeted remain low: Four out of every 1,000 returns filed were audited by the IRS in 2021, and audit rates have been declining over the last decade.
Still, the rise in audits for those earning less than $25,000 has raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill, with congressional Democrats asking the IRS to explain that increase as well as the agency’s reliance on correspondence audits — examinations by mail — to conduct them.
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