Originally Posted by Relentless

I don't know your age... Ask anyone who was in business before computers were commonplace. Ask any accountant old enough to recall that era. Keeping two sets of books, shuffling money out of a cash business (even massive cash businesses like casinos) was much simpler before the IRS had computers. It's hard to get you a url about information regarding IRS audits in the 1950s and 1960s precisely because computers didn't exist then and tracking that data was just as hard as doing the audits.

Now the IRS can target specific segments of society for audits and do pattern analysis. For example, see what percentage of income 'waitresses' reported as 'tips' nationwide, in one specific state, in one specific town, or from one specific restaurant chain if they want. Then they can see if one waitress is reporting much lower than in prior years or as compared to her industry. They don't have a guy sitting around doing that, they can run the whole analysis digitally and use the data to determine which segments of society to audit more aggressively.

Add in the erosion of privacy laws with things like the Patriot Act and gathering data about a business being investigating becomes tremendously easier than in the era before computers existed. These days people are not 'hiding' their income to avoid taxes, they are proudly reporting that they don't have to pay the tax on it because they have bought the politicians and had the tax code changed.

Romney paid 13% and said so right on his return. The government likely knows what his actual income was... and has no problem with him paying 13% because he did so legally (by using a broken set of tax rules carefully made impotent by wealthy people for exactly that purpose). Illegal tax evasion is much less of a problem now than it was in the 1950s, legal obfuscation has replaced it.

Btw Woj, as a coder... are you unable to see why having computers and scripts would make it easier to audit a pool of 200+ Million tax filers? If computers are not useful for handling that kind of massive data, what exactly do you do for a living and why don't you try doing it without a computer?