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.

Sam Pizzigati regales us with the sad result of the decades-long conservative “tax revolt” that has gutted social welfare programs and let wealthy taxpayers off the hook while left middle and lower class taxpayers are left holding the bag (via Adam.) He’s worth excerpting at length:

Tax relief had become, in the wink of an eye, America’s most potent political creed. Tax cutting and capping would go on to dominate the nation’s political discourse for the next three decades, an entire generation.

And what do we have to show for all this cutting and capping? Last week, researchers offered up two new studies that offer up a useful assessment.

The first, funded by the Social Security Administration, looks at the wealth of American families. That wealth, the Tax Revolters assured us,would start amassing again once taxpayers yanked “big government” out of our pockets.

The second new study zeroes in on state and local taxes. After years of tax revolting, this Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report asks, who exactly is paying taxes at the state and local level? Who has benefited the most, in tax terms, from the Tax Revolt the Tea Party zealots are now so fervently seeking to extend?

The answer: The rich have benefited the most. The Tax Revolt that began back in the late 1970s has, in state after state, let the affluent off the tax hook.

In fact, notes the new Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis, “nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy.”
In the entire United States, the analysis adds, “only two states require their best-off citizens to pay as much of their incomes in taxes as their very poorest taxpayers must pay, and only one state taxes its wealthiest individuals at a higher effective rate than middle-income families have to pay.”

America’s most affluent 1 percent now pay, on average, just 6.4 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. But they actually pay even less than that, since they can deduct their state and local taxes from their federal tax bill. The state and local tax burden on America’s rich, after taking this offset into account, drops to 5.2 percent.

Middle-income families — to be precise, those families who make up the middle fifth of America’s income distribution — pay, after the federal offset, 9.4 percent of their incomes in total state and local taxes.
America’s poorest families pay even more. Tax collectors take 10.9 percent of the incomes of households in the nation’s bottom 20 percent, more than double the share they take from the incomes of the nation’s top 1 percent.

Now you’ll frequently hear anti-tax zealots pointing to the higher rates of taxes that the wealthy generally pay, but that’s not the argument here (and that’s irrelevant in states like Texas, where much of the tax revenue is collected in the form of regressive sales taxes.) But as Nat-Wu aptly demonstrated in what I regard as one of his best and most informative posts, the wealthy are left with vastly more disposable income than you and I even if they are taxed at substantially higher rates. All it really comes down to is a matter of what you’ve got left to eat with at the end of the day, and while the wealthy are dining on caviar the middle and lower-classes are hoofing it to the pizza buffet. But that will always be the case. Never will the rich be taxed to a degree that would leave them with as much disposable income as a guy making $45,000 a year (nor would anyone other than a communist argue for such a thing.) No, the real travesty is the direction that the tax burden has taken; the only thing that’s trickled down as a result of the conservative obsession with tax cuts is the burden of paying for functioning governments.

Friends, this is the country we live in: the wealthy horde more of their money than ever before, investing it foolishly in things like securitized home mortgages. When those investment crash, their businesses are rescued by the federal government with the money you and I made doing what some of us might call “real” work, which is in turn converted into billions of dollars in profits and bonuses, much of which is in turn funneled to other wealthy and successful men and women in the form of campaign contributions so as to stave off anything approaching reform for this travesty. Would it be hyperbole to call the United States the largest and richest banana republic in the history of mankind? Well, what do you think?