Tax Administration

IRS' Improved Estimates of Tax Examination Yield Need to Be Refined Gao ID: GGD-90-119 September 5, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS): (1) methodology for estimating additional audit revenues obtained from hiring additional auditors; and (2) plans to track the results of the pending staffing increase.

GAO found that: (1) IRS used a revised methodology to compute the $1.1-billion estimate associated with the proposed fiscal year (FY) 1991 staffing increase; (2) IRS assumed that all the new staff would be working by the beginning of FY 1991 and that a revised and less costly training program would be in place at that time; (3) IRS assumed that the influx of new staff would allow experienced agents to work on higher-yield cases, thus further increasing audit revenues; (4) if Congress authorized the examination staffing increase, IRS planned to monitor its impact, but the reliability of that monitoring information would depend on the validity of the baseline from which IRS began tracking results; and (5) it could not assess the IRS baseline because IRS had not computed it yet.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone:


The Justia Government Accountability Office site republishes public reports retrieved from the U.S. GAO These reports should not be considered official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Justia.