The IRS audited a single woman with two kids on the belief that since she wasn’t reporting enough income to support herself and her two kids, she must have been earning income on the side (via BoingBoing):

Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don’t need government experts to tell you how broke you are.

But that’s what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.

It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.

She couldn’t believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ ”

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

[...]

The Porcaros say they get that the IRS can’t just audit the wealthy. Poor people commit fraud, too. But the intensity and duration of the IRS’ “obsession,” as Rob called it, as well as that it appears the agency was trolling for the working poor, remains a sore point.

So it would seem, according to this 2006 report:

According to new data from the Internal Revenue Service only 30 of the nation’s thousands of millionaires were subject to a face-to-face IRS audit in 2005. The very small number selected for the traditional and sometimes intensive audits were drawn from 184,054 individual tax returns reporting a total positive income of $1 million or more.

Analysis of IRS data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) further indicates that the audit rate for America’s wealthiest taxpayers is substantially lower than for the poorest.

Restricting the comparison to the agency’s comprehensive face-to-face audits, taxpayers reporting less than $25,000 in total positive income were six times more likely to be audited than those reporting $200,000 or more in income.

When the simpler and far more common correspondence audits are combined with the face-to-face audits, the poor taxpayers were still almost twice as likely to be audited as the wealthy.

Low income taxpayers also had higher audit rates than middle income taxpayers.

You might be wondering if the IRS actually recovers from one thousand audits of poor people the same amount as they might recover from one audit of one of those un-audited millionaires. It would be interesting to see someone do some math on that. Meanwhile, members of Congress are diligently assisting in the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest in this country, and ensuring that poor, defenseless millionaires are not forced to transfer an excessive amount of their estate to the government when they die.