<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/business/16AUDI.html> February 16, 2001 Single-Page Format Rate of All I.R.S. Audits Falls; Poor Face Intense Scrutiny By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Audits of tax returns by the Internal Revenue Service, already at a record low in 1999, fell almost 50 percent last year.
The chance of an individual tax return's being audited last year was less than one in 200, down from one in 112 in 1999 and one in 60 in 1996, new data and revised figures for last year show.
Even those figures significantly overstate the risk of an audit for most taxpayers. That is because, under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving particular attention to returns filed by the working poor who apply for a special tax credit. Such returns accounted for 44 percent of all audits....[snip]
...The recent economic boom has generated so much tax money that it masks the effect of cheating that has been encouraged by a lower risk of detection in audits, said David Burnham, a Syracuse University researcher whose team will soon post on its Web site detailed I.R.S. data, including figures on auditing of the poor that were not available yesterday from the I.R.S.
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