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Comment by ucha | Hacker News Reader

It's not as simple as that... The wealthy are, justly, disproportionally targeted by audits, 10x more likely to be audited if you make more than $10m vs less than $100k.

Vast ressources will not necessarily prevent you from being convicted of tax evasion cf. Charles Kushner who evaded low 5 figures in taxes while being a centimillionaire.

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> The wealthy are, justly, disproportionally targeted by audits,

Nope, they, unjustly, are not:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-ameri...

Yes, your article says that both the poor and the rich are more likely to be targeted which is true but it doesn't negate my claim. The very rich are much more likely to be targeted than any other category.

https://taxfoundation.org/irs-audited-12-million-households-...

Do you have any proof to back up that "the rich are 10x more likely to be audited"? Not trying to call you out but I'd like to read it, that number seems extremely far fetched. My guess is everyone has a small percent chance to get audited every year (unless they find a obvious issue) and it's just a flip of a coin.

I imagine they have some kind of algorithm or MI to assist in finding discrepancies based on historical wins/loses.

I doubt it's as simple as I made 10 million, therefore I am going to get audited eventually.

It's actually the opposite as far as I know. There have been several well-researched articles in the last few years about this.

The automated flagging they use is tuned to find the common mundane violations, which tend to be by normal people with normal resources.

The tax strategies of the extremely wealthy are a good deal more sophisticated and don't lend themselves well to automated checks like these.

People who declare (or don't declare) $0 income and high income tax payers are disproportionally likely to be audited. And if you make $10mm+ for a number of year, you're almost certainly going to be audited and anecdotally, that has been what I've seen.

https://taxfoundation.org/irs-audited-12-million-households-...

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