However, the IRS has had reductions in staff and funding which made it harder to go after the bigger accounts who have more forensic accounting needing to be done to find the money in the various tax shelters.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/irs-faces-challenges-in-...

> "The IRS is simultaneously confronting a reduction of 27% of its workforce, leadership turnover, and the implementation of extensive and complex tax law changes" mandated by Republicans' tax and spending measure that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer, Collins said in her report.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-fiscal-impact-o... (May 2025)

> The Global High Wealth department of the IRS is designed to audit ultrawealthy individuals and corporations, who often hire highly sophisticated tax advisors to devise ways to avoid taxes and to respond to the IRS if they are challenged. But, as of late March, the department was cut by nearly 40 percent—and likely more by now with the additional RIFs.

I would be willing to contend that while they've got a 93% overall, that's historical numbers and the teams that would go against Meta and others are severely understaffed.

*edit: since my words were take in bad faith

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.... they were audits according to IRS. This is from the FOIA'd audit numbers from IRS via TRAC.

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>I'm very confused about where you're going with this. Are you upset that too many rich people are getting audited, or that tax cheats under 400k income might also get audited?

... this was a direct response to parent stating increased funding was added specifically for going after rich people. Yes I would be upset if I was told they were adding new funding specifically to go after rich tax cheats but then turns out to be something like "welp actually we refuse to codify that or make anything binding that it will be used for those purposes, but for the cameras we will pinky swear it will be used for that and please don't look at the historical data for inferences."

It's not so much that it's hard, it's that it has a lower return on investment, because the IRS gets money from finding mistakes or intentional fraud. Megacorps have entire legal teams dedicated to preventing those things from happening, while lowering their taxes by finding lawful ways of reducing their taxes to almost nothing by pouring over the unfathomable complexity of the tax code to find obscure credits or chain together the right sequence of things so their profits end up in a jurisdiction where they're not taxed.

If you audit them you spend an enormous amount of resources because their accounts are so complicated and then only get money if they screwed up, which they're less likely to have done than someone with fewer lawyers, and even then it will typically be something like you found a credit they weren't allowed to take and they owe $50,000 but the thing where they have a hundred billion in revenue and 0.2% of that in taxable profit was all by the book.

Meanwhile smaller entities are far more likely to have screwed up because they have fewer resources to navigate the complexity of the tax code, and their accounts are less complicated, which makes it easier for the IRS to find mistakes and therefore get money. So if you give the IRS more resources and tell them to do audits to maximize recovery, those are the people they audit.

But that also involves auditing a ton of individuals and small businesses who didn't do anything wrong in order to find the ones that did, and they rightfully hate that because nobody is paying them for the actual costs of the audit where the IRS found nothing, which is why they keep lobbying to stop the IRS from getting more resources to do that to them. And if the IRS had to pay the taxpayer's side of the audit costs then their "recovery efficiency rate" would go way down.

This exactly why ICE agents tends to target illegal immigrants that actually get a job and contribute to the society instead of criminals. Because the former are easy targets.

Also fundamentally the tax law in the US are intrinsically favor capital owners, especially large corporations, adding more IRS agents only cost more tax payer’s money and give regular people more headaches.