The Internal Revenue Service audited 11,715 of the 225,000 Americans who reported incomes of more than $1 million in 2005, the tax collection agency said, providing a rare glimpse of its efforts to ensure wealthy taxpayers comply with tax laws.
The IRS released the data to counter charges by Syra- cuse University researchers that the agency conducted face-to-face audits of only 30 households reporting incomes of more than $1 million. The discrepancy is due to a change in the way the IRS keeps records, officials said.
“The bottom line is we recently added a new audit classification of a million or more,” IRS spokesman Frank Keith said. Most of the audits of $1 million income returns were lumped into earlier categories that counted only examinations of returns reporting $100,000 and up, he said.
Syracuse University’s Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse said Tuesday that data released recently by the IRS shows Americans who report incomes of less than $25,000 are nearly twice as likely to be audited as those with incomes of more than $200,000.
The university’s researchers said 8.8 of every 1,000 tax returns reporting income of under $25,000 were examined in 2005, compared with only 4.6 out of every 1,000 returns that reported more than $200,000.
