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Or just that there are more poor people. Say 10% of all people are tax cheats, evenly across income. The top 1% who are the rich is much smaller than the bottom 50% who are the poor. So in absolute numbers there will be far more poor tax cheats than wealthy. Even if 100% of the wealthy are tax cheats, that still ends up being fewer wealthy tax cheats than poor tax cheats. Anything involving absolute numbers of audits is going to be skewed to show more happening to the poor, because there are so many more poor people than rich people.
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Last I checked it's way closer to 28% than 48% of people that have earned income of at least $1 (thus EITC) and total income less than $25k -- which fall under the bucket of 48% of audits were for those with EITC and income under 25k. They are definitely disproportionately going after the poorest workers.
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am i missing something, or is the statistic that is used to pinpoint someone as poor, is the same statistic that is gamed here? Namely the amount of income that a person declares to the IRS?
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