Rather than defend, I'll just correct your false conclusions.
As usual, you supply no supporting links or even a source for your map.
Never mind; I found it. Why did you cut off the footnote that shows your old data to be from 2012 to 2015 ?
The IRS has been understaffed for years.
Audits of low income taxpayers are predominantly by letter and automation. Audits of high income earners are hampered by their complexity and the shortfall in experienced audit staff. A lower budget meant that the IRS hired more basic examiners rather than staff that could handle complex returns.
This is not Democrats chasing the poor. It is the result of years of under funding.
What is a common feature of those low income taxpayers being audited ? Many claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, often incorrectly.
Guess who pushed for more IRS auditing of EITC recipients; Republicans. Who's pushing to solve the problem: Democrats. Emphasis added below.
"Who’s More Likely to Be Audited: A Person Making $20,000 — or $400,000?
If you claim the earned income tax credit, whose average recipient makes less than $20,000 a year, you’re more likely to face IRS scrutiny than someone making twenty times as much. How a benefit for the working poor was turned against them.
Budget cuts have crippled the IRS over the past eight years. Enforcement staff has dropped by a third. But while the number of audits has fallen across the board, the impact has been different for the rich and poor. For wealthy taxpayers, the story has been rosy: Not only has the audit rate been cut in half, but audits now tend to be less thorough."
"Generally, the more money you make, the more likely you are to be audited. EITC recipients, whose typical annual income is under $20,000, have long been the major exception. That’s because many people claim the credit in error, and, under consistent pressure from Republicans in Congress to curtail those overpayments, the IRS has kept the audit rate higher. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been similar pressure to address more costly problem areas, like tax evasion by business owners.
The budget cuts and staff losses have made this distortion starker. The richest taxpayers are still audited at higher rates than the poorest, but the gap is closing."
"As the IRS has dwindled in size and capability, audits of the poor have accounted for more of what it does. Last year, the IRS audited 381,000 recipients of the EITC. That was 36 percent of all audits the IRS conducted, up from 33 percent in 2011, when the budget cuts began.
“Those struggling to make ends meet are being unfairly audited while the fortunate few dodge taxes without consequence,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, told ProPublica.
“The IRS needs more manpower to go after tax cheats of all sizes, and working Americans need a simpler way of obtaining a tax credit they’ve earned.”
