Comment by bdangubic
4 months ago
in order for going after everyone (or whatever arbitrary number we choose) it needs to be economically feasible. it is simple math and should be explained in simple math terms. it cost on average X amount to “go after someone” - if that amount exceeds what potential benefit is based of course on earning then we do it. otherwise it makes no sense. except we make this a political issue (as everything else). any sane person running IRS would do the math and figure out what the number is where it makes sense to go after someone
Getting one persons taxes is not why you enforce, any more than why the police enforce other kinds of laws that don't have anything to do with bill collecting.
don’t disagree at all but what is a sensible policy you would implement regarding IRS audits?
Whatever someone who's job and education is to develop such policies says. It's not my profession and it doesn't have to be.
The point is simply that even merely picking 1% or 0.1% of people completely at random to audit keeps 99% of normal people in line, which is far more valuable to society (not just in immediate dollars) than the cost of those few actual audits, regardless what those audits "earn" in collecting a few, or zero, or indeed negative dollars that might have gone uncollected from a random individual. There is no reason an audit should not show that there was an error and the government owes the taxayer, let alone collecting nothing or collecting less than the cost of the audit.
The police's job is not to recover ypur stolen lawnmower, it's to maintain order in general. They expend many thousands of dollars in resources to track down a lawnmower theif not to recover your $400 possession, but to inhibit the activity of theft in general.
Tax audits are, or should be imo, like that.
The actual details of what should be written in the IRS manual are this: Something.
It's a meaningless question since we're not at that level. I'm only talking about the fallacy of treating tax audits as nothing more than a direct and immediate source of income instead of a means to maintain order and a far greater but indirect source of income.
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