Washington — More Americans say cheating at least a little on taxes is acceptable, an attitude that coincides with a declining possibility they will be caught through an audit.
About 76 percent of taxpayers agreed when asked in a recent survey if they should cheat "not at all" on their taxes meaning almost a quarter felt otherwise. Eleven percent said it was OK to cheat "a little here and there," with 5 percent saying people could cheat "as much as possible."
Each number represents a significant change compared with 1999, when the Internal Revenue Service asked taxpayers the same questions. The biggest difference was in the "not at all" question: 87 percent agreed then that any cheating was unacceptable.
The most recent survey was conducted by the Roper polling organization for the IRS Oversight Board, created by Congress as an independent agency watchdog.
The board's chairman, Larry Levitan, said although the survey only presents a short-term snapshot of taxpayer attitudes it does "indicate some erosion in the commitment to the importance of paying taxes."
"If future results show a continuation of that attitude, that's a cause for alarm," Levitan said. The board intends to do similar surveys each year.
The survey findings come as the IRS struggles to reverse a long-term decline in its enforcement activity, including the steep slide in audits.
In 1988, one of every 79 tax returns was audited, or a total of about 1.77 million.
But by 2000, the 716,000 audits represented only one of every 232 returns.
There are several reasons for this, the Oversight Board found. The number of IRS employees has dropped over the same period, even as the number of returns filed continues to rise.
The tax code itself gets bigger and more complicated every year, coming in at 1.4 million words and 20,000 pages of regulations. The IRS also must operate with 1960s-era mainframe computers, which gradually are being phased out.
The IRS announced this week it would randomly check about 50,000 returns this year, in an effort to glean information to target audits better in the future.
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