A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to Douglas H. Shulman, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) inspected the tax agency’s financial statements from the 2009 fiscal year with the exacting thoroughness of an IRS auditor, and found a few billion-dollar errors.
It should be noted that the GAO does this every year for the IRS, providing an outside set of eyes on the procedures in place and recommending improvements.
The IRS has in excess of 101,000 employees
Tax collections for fiscal year (FY) 2007 were $1.36 trillion from individuals and roughly $2.69 trillion in total, including employment and corporate taxes, estate, excise, and gift taxes. For Individual income tax, the top 5% of income earners pay $816 billion or roughly 60% of this amount.
According to the GAO report, the IRS made a assortment of accounting errors last year that “could adversely affect the reliability of its financial statements” and result in “duplicate or erroneous refunds.”
Among the mistakes were a “failure to record the receipt of a (single) taxpayer’s $3 million payment” and an $8 billion discrepancy between two separate accounting systems tracking how much money taxpayers owe. The audit also found a $5.1 billion “unexplained variance” between the amount the detailed tax files recorded and the total amount the agency took in last year.
This is similar to any large corporation that handles a large inventory. Supermarkets and other retail businesses are constantly reconciling their inventory. The “book” is the recording of transactions made. The “actual” is the actual count on hand.
Considering the size of the IRS, the errors are all relatively minor infractions.
The 41 recommendations given to the IRS addressed:
- internal controls,
- training and reviews of procedures processed by workers
- supervisor reviews were focused more on timeliness of processing rather than the accuracy of applying payments.
The GAO sums up its assessment by referring to “long-standing material weakness in its internal control over unpaid assessment.”
There were no performance infractions except:
- failure to redistribute unpaid tax liability to all responsible company officers when a tax payment had been made, and
- reconciling inventory contents from Lockbox banks who forward unacceptable forms of payment such as traveler’s checks, gold coins, and other easily negotiable items of value. On several occasions there were discrepancies between the inventory recorded and the inventory received.
It is a good thing even the IRS has oversight control, so we can know our taxes are properly received. And, it gives a little satisfaction to the American taxpayer that the IRS shares the stress associated with an audit.
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