IRS to Kick Off Compliance Study

The Internal Revenue Service revealed plans to launch a new National Research Program reporting compliance study for individual taxpayers that would provide updated and more accurate audit selection tools and support efforts to reduce the nation's $300 billion-plus tax gap. The latest NRP study will be the first of an ongoing series of annual individual studies using an innovative multi-year rolling methodology. The study is scheduled to start in October 2007 and examine about 13,000 randomly selected 2006 individual returns. Similar sample sizes will be used in subsequent tax years. The IRS said that the advantage of combining results over rolling three-year periods is that it would be able to make annual updates to compliance estimates and develop more efficient workload plans on an annual basis. Previous studies started from scratch, drew tax returns from a single tax year and involved examinations of more than 45,000 taxpayers. The initial group of taxpayers whose returns are selected for audit under the new NRP study will start receiving official letters in October informing them that they are part of the research study.