GAO: IRS Audits 1% of Big Partnerships, 27% of Big Corporations

Following up on my previous post, David Cay Johnston, How to Cheat on Your Taxes: the Government Accountability Office has released Characteristics of Population and IRS Audits (GAO-14-379R):

This report provides data on the number and characteristics of large partnerships as well as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits of large partnership returns. For purposes of this report, GAO did not identify a statutory, IRS, or industry-accepted definition of a large partnership. Instead, GAO used a combination of criteria for partner size and asset size used by IRS to define large partnerships as those that reported having 100 or more direct partners and $100 million or more in assets. The number of large partnerships increased from 720 in tax year 2002 to 2,226 in tax year 2011. Large partnerships also increased in terms of the average number of direct partners and average asset size. IRS had data on two categories of large partnership return audits. First, the number of completed field audits of large partnership returns increased from 11 in fiscal year 2007 to 31 in fiscal year 2013. Second, IRS counted audits closed through its campus function, which increased from 42 to 143 over the same period. Unlike field audits, campus function audits generally do not entail a review of the books and records of the large partnership return but rather were opened to pass through large partnership return audit adjustments to the related partners' returns. The percentage of IRS audits that resulted in no change to the taxpayer's return varied from fiscal year 2007 to 2013 but was 52 percent for campus function audits and 45 percent for field audits in fiscal year 2013.

• Accounting Today, IRS Doing More Audits of Large Partnerships
• Wall Street Journal, Senators Say IRS Fails to Audit 99% of Big Partnerships
• Washington Post, IRS Audits Less Than 1 Percent of Big Partnerships