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Comment by Spellman | Hacker News Reader

Generally they don't harass people unless something seems amiss and there is a large enough discrepancy to justify it.

And there's eventually a marginal tipping point where more money spent in audits won't net more recovered revenue. Generally the smaller the fry, the less you can recover from them.

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I was much younger and not involved in the finances, but my family's business was audited 4(ish?) times in under a decade, which is essentially a "guilty under proven innocent" scenario where we had to prove we didn't owe the money ($50k+) that the IRS claimed we did or we had to pay it. Each audit was easily a hundred hours which we would always end up paying nothing or having the IRS owe us money in the end for.

Though, since I wasn't aware of our financials, for all I know my parents could have just been poorly keeping track of the numbers which led to these issues.

Unless you were a conservative group a few years back.

'The controversy began in 2013 when an IRS official admitted the agency had been aggressively scrutinizing groups with names such as "Tea Party" and "Patriots."'

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-...

because they were abusing their tax exempt status. But that's the part you probably don't like to say out loud.

Do you have a source for this?

> the agency had been aggressively scrutinizing groups with names such as "Tea Party" and "Patriots."

So the IRS was profiling pro-profiling groups based on their extensive association with anti-tax and anti-government political currents, expecting that people who don't think they should pay taxes may well be trying to avoid paying taxes less than honestly?

According to KOS at the time, literally the only group which got their 501(c)(4) application reviewed and rejected during that "scandal" was a progressive one. Meanwhile a bunch of "tea party" associates got their 501(c)(4) (or worse 501(c)(4)) despite historical and ongoing partisan political work.

Sounds like "conservatives v twitter", where conservatives cry foul every time they get on a blocklist, and twitter replies that they can't autoban white supremacists the way they did ISIS because it'd throw out half the republican conference and a significant fraction of their followers.

All in all, just more and more examples of Wilhoit's hypothesis

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[0] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/5/19/1210132/-The-Only...

The article linked in the margin on that article says that they targeted progressive groups too, though.

>Generally they don't harass people unless something seems amiss and there is a large enough discrepancy to justify it.

There are lots of anecdotal reports to the contrary of what you just stated. Do you have anything more than anecdotal evidence to support your statement?

I remember reading in Australia they specifically went after small businesses because as I said they had little ability to defend themselves.

> Two Australian Taxation Office whistleblowers have told a joint Four Corners and Fairfax investigation about a toxic internal culture where vulnerable small businesses and individuals are deliberately targeted to help meet revenue goals.

Perverse incentives.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-09/whistleblower-exposes...

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