Richard Rubin

There are fewer people doing tax enforcement now.

It's the very public shrinking of the IRS that we've seen over the past year.

We know that the IRS has fewer people, particularly on auditors, revenue agents, the people who do the civil tax enforcement.

There are fewer of them than there were a year ago, 15 months ago when the Trump administration took office.

And with such a shrunken down IRS... People are feeling like it might be easier to get away with things than they used to.

Tax lawyers saw that directly.

They saw cases get dropped.

They saw cases get passed between agents.

And taxpayers, you know, read the news and see that, you know, there's thousands fewer people doing enforcement at the IRS.

There's clearly a perception building that it may be easier to cheat, to skirt, to cut corners than it used to be a year or two ago.

Back then,

There was very minimal e-filing.

In the 90s, people would go and like line up at the post office and they would like, you know, you'd like hand off your return to the person standing outside the post office.

And there was this, you know, rush to physically mail things on April 15th.

Now as opposed to then.

Yeah, the three main buckets would be audits, collections, and criminal.

You're going to be looking for some evidence of those credit card transactions and the cash that makes up the difference.

You're going to be looking for documents that back up the mileage that the business owner drove, the equipment that they purchased, all those kinds of things.

The audit is, did you do this right?

Did you follow the law?