Shortly after publishing my post about your odds of being audited by the IRS, a reader sent me a message with a link to a CBS News article suggesting that your chances of being audited were actually much higher than previously thought. That is what the bold type headline screams, at least.
In reality, if you read the entire article, you’ll find that the odds of triggering an IRS audit are pretty much right in line with what I said in my article. What this other news article points out is that there are ways for the IRS to contact you that aren’t really audits. If you include these not-audits in the count of actual audits, then you get, not surprisingly, a much higher number of audits. In particular, the article focuses on ominous letters that IRS sends out to taxpayers, which are very much not audits. In fact, the letters cited in the article are about as far from an audit as you can get.
One of the letters informs taxpayers of a math error in their tax returns. This is not an audit. This is a notice that you messed up your math and therefore need to pay your taxes based upon the correct math. This scenario in no way results in anyone questioning your deductions or asking you to prove anything on your tax return with financial records. An audit is a re-examination of your tax return, not a request for you to fix a math error. Assuming you use tax software and take the 2011 standard deduction, there is a small chance of filing a return with a math error in it.
Another of the letters mentions the electronic system the IRS has to match reported data with the amounts listed on a tax return. I did allude in my post to the fact that the IRS matches information reported directly to it by your employer and other financial relationships with the amounts you actually report on your income tax forms. I even mentioned that this is an are where only a fool tries any funny business. Again, the result of this scenario is a letter in which the IRS in no way re-examines your return except to change the results of your calculations based upon the numbers that are reported to the Internal Revenue Service directly. This is not an audit either.
The point of my article about the low chances of being audited was not to encourage people to cheat on their taxes, nor to suggest that anyone cheat because the risk of audit is so low. Rather, I hoped to make filing income taxes a little less tense. People get so worked up about getting audited that they don’t take tax deductions or credits that they qualify for, for risk of being audited. That isn’t smart personal finance strategy, but neither is cheating.
Go into doing your taxes realizing that they can be a bit complicated, although there are tax prep software packages that help, but there is no need to walk around in fear of a potential audit. It might happen, but chances are it won’t. Just don’t freak out about it for no reason.
Tags: audit, Deductions, Federal Income Taxes, income taxes, IRS
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