How much did Congress lose by defunding the IRS? Way more than we thought.
< < Go Back
The White House and Congress recently agreed to claw back more than $20 billion earmarked for the Internal Revenue Service. This deal was, ostensibly, part of a grand bargain to reduce budget deficits.
Unfortunately, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Every dollar available for auditing taxpayers generates many times that amount for government coffers — and the rate of return is especially astonishing for audits of the wealthiest Americans, according to new research shared exclusively with The Post.
A team of researchers at Harvard University, the University of Sydney and the Treasury Department examined internal IRS data for approximately 710,000 in-person audits from 2010 to 2014. Here’s what they found:
More From The Washington Post (subscription required):
Rss Feed