News release: “The Internal Revenue Service today released a new set of tax gap estimates for tax year 2006. The tax gap is defined as the amount of tax liability faced by taxpayers that is not paid on time. The new tax gap estimate represents the first full update of the report in five years, and it shows the nation’s compliance rate is essentially unchanged from the last review covering tax year 2001. The tax gap statistic is a helpful guide to the scale of tax compliance and to the persisting sources of low compliance, but it is not an adequate guide to year-to-year changes in IRS programs or to year-to-year returns on IRS service and enforcement initiatives.”