That's a success rate that largely is based on suing people who don't have the resources to fight it (no claims made about if they're right or not).

However, the IRS has had reductions in staff and funding which made it harder to go after the bigger accounts who have more forensic accounting needing to be done to find the money in the various tax shelters.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/irs-faces-challenges-in-...

> "The IRS is simultaneously confronting a reduction of 27% of its workforce, leadership turnover, and the implementation of extensive and complex tax law changes" mandated by Republicans' tax and spending measure that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, Collins said in her report.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-fiscal-impact-o... (May 2025)

> The Global High Wealth department of the IRS is designed to audit ultrawealthy individuals and corporations, who often hire highly sophisticated tax advisors to devise ways to avoid taxes and to respond to the IRS if they are challenged. But, as of late March, the department was cut by nearly 40 percent—and likely more by now with the additional RIFs.

I would be willing to contend that while they've got a 93% overall, that's historical numbers and the teams that would go against Meta and others are severely understaffed.

What's the success rate when data is limited to only very large companies, say top 50 in size?

And I would estimate 30% of people using tax shelters are underpaying their taxes. If there's profitable work to do for tax auditors, hire more auditors and cover both problems.

Even if you change the view to it's mostly the poor who are the tax scammers it doesn't degrade the counterpoints that these auditors were by far mostly going after the middle class and poor -- you're just asserting the poors are *disproportionately tax cheats that perhaps deserve it.

*edit: since my words were take in bad faith

Also, if tax cheating is uniform across the population, then the statement "there are more tax cheats earning under 200k" is true but wildly misleading, since "there are more taxpayers earning under 200k" is also true.

Nowhere near 48% of the population earns enough wages for EITC but still under 25k. It's way way way way overrepresented in audits. Nearly half of the audits are aimed at the poorest workers.

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.... they were audits according to IRS. This is from the FOIA'd audit numbers from IRS via TRAC.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this comment as it's true.

Democrats increased IRS funding so it could go after more tax evaders. Conservative estimates are that eliminating tax evasion (evasion, not avoidance) by the ultra-wealthy could allow the U.S. to reduce rate brackets by 2-3% across the board while maintaining revenue.

Yet they refused to codify the "promise" it wouldn't be used for under 400k income families. Look at what they do, not what they say. In public they make 'promises' but in statute it turns into ether, meanwhile real audit data pointing to otherwise.

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>I'm very confused about where you're going with this. Are you upset that too many rich people are getting audited, or that tax cheats under 400k income might also get audited?

... this was a direct response to parent stating increased funding was added specifically for going after rich people. Yes I would be upset if I was told they were adding new funding specifically to go after rich tax cheats but then turns out to be something like "welp actually we refuse to codify that or make anything binding that it will be used for those purposes, but for the cameras we will pinky swear it will be used for that and please don't look at the historical data for inferences."

True, as it is just another symptom of not too much wealth, but the growing disconnect of what wealth is designed to be. Money shouldn't be power, too many people are starting to blame "too much money" instead of asking why money is turning into political power. Seemingly none of the politicians or rich people want that narrative because they all want both.

The notion that audits should be evenly distributed is nonsense. Someone making sub-$200K usually has basic W2 income, versus someone making $20M a year who likely has an extremely complicated web of capital gains, deductions, strategies, carry-forward losses etc.

It doesn't even make sense from a pure cash point of view. It's better for an agent to audit someone making $20M and win a $500K judgement than it is for them to audit 1,000 $25K earners and fleece them $500 a piece. What a waste.

Audits should be exponentially lopsided, not targeted exclusively at the middle class.

$29B over ten years is an annual amount of less than 1% of Microsoft's current annual revenue. Meanwhile the company is appealing it so the government hasn't actually won anything yet (but is incurring additional costs), and on top of that it means there is now going to be a court decision about how this works, which benefits the companies wanting to do it by clarifying the law so that even if they lose the courts will have told them what they need to do differently next time in order to win. Of course, if they win then it's even better for them because then they can just keep doing what they were doing before.

The actual problem is that "transfer pricing" is inherently ambiguous and subject to manipulation but it would take structural legislative changes to the tax code (e.g. tax corporations using something other than corporate income tax) to take it out of play.

> You're saying auditing megacorps is hard, but somehow more staff won't help? I don't buy it.

It's not so much that it's hard, it's that it has a lower return on investment, because the IRS gets money from finding mistakes or intentional fraud. Megacorps have entire legal teams dedicated to preventing those things from happening, while lowering their taxes by finding lawful ways of reducing their taxes to almost nothing by pouring over the unfathomable complexity of the tax code to find obscure credits or chain together the right sequence of things so their profits end up in a jurisdiction where they're not taxed.

If you audit them you spend an enormous amount of resources because their accounts are so complicated and then only get money if they screwed up, which they're less likely to have done than someone with fewer lawyers, and even then it will typically be something like you found a credit they weren't allowed to take and they owe $50,000 but the thing where they have a hundred billion in revenue and 0.2% of that in taxable profit was all by the book.

Meanwhile smaller entities are far more likely to have screwed up because they have fewer resources to navigate the complexity of the tax code, and their accounts are less complicated, which makes it easier for the IRS to find mistakes and therefore get money. So if you give the IRS more resources and tell them to do audits to maximize recovery, those are the people they audit.

But that also involves auditing a ton of individuals and small businesses who didn't do anything wrong in order to find the ones that did, and they rightfully hate that because nobody is paying them for the actual costs of the audit where the IRS found nothing, which is why they keep lobbying to stop the IRS from getting more resources to do that to them. And if the IRS had to pay the taxpayer's side of the audit costs then their "recovery efficiency rate" would go way down.

I think they are suggesting the lack of political will to go after big companies is the bigger problem

Of course it won’t help. If you have an audit target to meet you want target meta?

This exactly why ICE agents tends to target illegal immigrants that actually get a job and contribute to the society instead of criminals. Because the former are easy targets.

Also fundamentally the tax law in the US are intrinsically favor capital owners, especially large corporations, adding more IRS agents only cost more tax payer’s money and give regular people more headaches.

In that case I can't think of time my country hasn't been a regime I guess. Police have pretty much always been executing people in the streets without repercussions. Although there has been a small amount of progress recently, these days they do it on camera and still face zero repercussions much of the time.