Corporate Risk of a Tax Audit Is Still Shrinking, I.R.S. Data Show
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: April 12, 2004
ince taking office, the Bush administration has repeatedly promised to get tough with tax cheats, saying it has ended a long slide in enforcement of tax laws.
But an independent analysis of new Internal Revenue Service data released today shows that tax enforcement has fallen steadily under President Bush, with fewer audits, fewer penalties, fewer prosecutions and virtually no effort to prosecute corporate tax crimes. The audit rate for the 11,200 largest corporations, which pay nearly all corporate income taxes, has fallen by almost half over the last decade, as has the audit rate for unincorporated businesses.
David Burnham, a director of the Syracuse University research organization that reviewed the government data, said that "President Bush and the I.R.S. commissioner have been running around talking about how they are going after corporate scofflaws, but the I.R.S. data suggest that the effort against corporate scofflaws is continuing to decline."
Today, the I.R.S. has about half the law enforcement resources for each tax return that it did in 1988, the Syracuse researchers said. The university's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse will post the data at trac.syr.edu.
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