All eyes are on a new finding that the U.S. government sent $1.4 billion in $1,200 stimulus checks to dead people. Only can the state make such a disastrous mistake.
But here is another discovery that is flying under the radar: Audits are a waste of money.
According to a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the Internal Revenue Service wasted $22.7 million auditing tax returns that resulted in no additional revenue for the federal government.
The agency watchdog stated that nearly half (47.2 percent) of audits on large companies from fiscal years 2016 to 2018 did not generate any extra revenue.
“Based on the results of our data analyses, we found that the LB&I Division is not examining the most productive cases,” the inspector general said in the report, referring to the IRS’s large business and international audit unit. “If this condition is not corrected, the LB&I Division risks expending limited resources on unproductive returns and unnecessarily burdening compliant taxpayers.”
Here is another goodie: The IRS spent as much time on audits where there was no change as it did on cases where the taxpayer was determined to owe additional money.
This is another case of government waste and justification of budgets.
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