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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

I can find someone making that case with a quick Google: https://www.april15th.com/irs-problems/why-irs-audits-more-s...

> The IRS brings in more dollars per hour auditing small mom and pop businesses, than they do auditing medium and large companies.

> Why is that the case? Because the larger companies keep impeccable records and have tax experts to defend them; Enrolled Agents, CPAs, or tax attorneys that usually know more about the Tax Code than the IRS auditor-employee.

I've found it in my conversations with people justifying the recent increases in IRS agents and the new $600 reporting requirement.

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Reading that link, it appears they are saying the IRS is concentrates its efforts on small businesses because they have the best chance of recovery.

You called it a fairy tale, do you believe that big corporations are actually bigger tax cheats than small businesses, and they're just getting away with it somehow?

I do not have any of direct evidence of anything, I'm just a guy with a brain. This is one of many in a long series of "coincidences" that when put together starts to become nonsensical.

Look at where we started.

Pfizer gets fined more beacuse they are a bigger company and have more surface area, the law is complex and everyone is breaking it all the time so action against them doesn't mean they did anything wrong. In and of itself fine, that may be true.

Then those same people will later say, the IRS went after that Mexican restaurant instead of Pfizer beacuse they are so big, and run such a tight ship that it would almost impossible to find any wrong doing.

The tax code is very complex, so is drug regulation. Is the idea that Pfizer is hyper competent in tax law but incompetent when it comes to the core business? That doesn't hold water for me.

Maybe you're right, but I think it's more likely that Pfizer, as a business, is more willing to accept risk in the pursuit of its core business aims than in its accounting, and that's all we're seeing. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/14/too-many-people-dare-c...

It could also be that the endeavor of drug discovery and manufacture is inherently more risky than accounting. From the academic sense, it is not a field of mathematical certainty, but one of subjective risk-benefit tradeoffs.

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