NEWS FLASH

Every Hour Spent Auditing Corporate Tax Returns Yields More Than $9,000 In Revenue | Near the top of the list of counterproductive budget cuts is cutting funds for the Internal Revenue Service, as every dollar of tax enforcement yields $4-$5 in revenue in a country where uncollected taxes have hit $385 billion per year. Along those lines, Reuters’ David Cay Johnston noted today that IRS auditors “assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year.” “The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll,” Johnston wrote.