“IRS attention to auditing very large and giant corporations has plummeted from FY 2010 through the first five months of FY 2016. This is a consequence of Congress’s continued sharp cuts in IRS budgets, according to a new analysis of agency records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.  The likely result: even steeper reductions in government revenues. Among the Key Findings:

• Revenue agent hours aimed at corporations with $250 million or more in assets in the period from FY 2010 through FY 2015 period have declined by more than a third (34%), while unreported taxes uncovered by IRS that would otherwise have been lost to the government dropped by almost two thirds (64%).
• Declines were even sharper for the giants of the business world — those with $20 billion or more in assets.
• Even more recent data through February of 2016 indicate that business audits of large companies are running 22 percent lower this year than for the same period last year.
• As a result, the potential loss to the government now amounts to $15 billion or more a year.
• This report on IRS audit and collection practices is the latest in a series of such special studies that have been posted on TRAC’s IRS website since March 1997. For more details, see the full report here.”