TaxAudit

No one is claiming that an IRS audit is a cakewalk. But a tax audit is probably less likely -- and less gruesome -- than most people fear. And the IRS isn't allowed to swoop down upon you just any old time: Their clock is ticking.

Nobody enjoys paying taxes, so hearing that Congress is cutting the IRS budget might inspire you to applaud. But this is the agency that makes sure the rest of government gets funded, and stops the unscrupulous from dodging their fair share of the burden.

The IRS has made no secret of the fact that it is ramping up audits in order to close the "tax gap." The "tax gap" is the difference between what the IRS expects to collect and what it actually does collect. In 2005, the IRS estimated this gross tax gap, before collections efforts, to be...

For the fiscal year 2009, about one out of every 100 taxpayers were chosen for an audit. In terms of numbers, 1.4 million taxpayers were selected for either a correspondence or a personal audit. Statistically, those are pretty good odds for taxpayers. While there's no magic formula to determine...

It's no secret that the IRS is ramping up the number of audits in an attempt to close the "tax gap." That's the term the IRS is using to account for the difference between the taxes it believes it should have collected and what it actually managed to collect. For 2001 (the last year for which data...

Recent news that celebrity Nicolas Cage (real name Nicolas Coppola) cut a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to pay $666,000 plus interest has taxpayers scratching their heads. The IRS initially determined that Cage improperly deducted $3.3 million in personal expenses from 2002 to 2004. The...

The Internal Revenue Service has announced a new warning letter it will be sending to taxpayers. It's replacing a letter than used to go out which suggested changes to income, deductions and credits. The new letter will simply tell taxpayers to check their tax returns, and if they think they've...

Sharon Kukhan is known for selling a tax "decoder" scheme to help taxpayers avoid paying federal income taxes. She claimed she could "decode" the taxpayers' tax records to show that they were not required to pay income. Her system was based on the lie that clients did not have to pay income taxes...

All you millionaires reading WalletPop are now put on notice: You're far more likely than me to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Who knew? Well, truthfully, we all probably expected that the IRS audited the wealthy much more often. It just makes sense... the more money there is to audit,...