TRAC IRS Report

Only 30 out of more than 180,000 Millionaires Faced Traditional IRS Audits Last Year

Audit Rates for Low Income Taxpayers Greater than for Top Earners

IRS Says Release of Statistics that Might Explain Aberration "Would Adversely Affect Tax Administration"

Syracuse, March 28 -- According to new data from the Internal Revenue Service only 30 of the nation's thousands of millionaires were subject to a face-to-face IRS audit in 2005. The very small number selected for the traditional and sometimes intensive audits were drawn from 184,054 individual tax returns reporting a total positive income of $1 million or more.

Analysis of IRS data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) further indicates that the audit rate for America's wealthiest taxpayers is substantially lower than for the poorest. See Figure 1 and supporting table.

IRS audit data | Posted March 28, 2006 03:05 PM by John Irons