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The Internal Revenue Service plans to audit 75 large partnerships, including real estate specialists and hedge funds, though the agency hasn't yet named the companies involved, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The focus will be on size: Each of the audited companies will have assets averaging $10B, according to the agency, and they will be formally notified of their audits within a few weeks. The IRS will also turn its attention to about 1,600 individuals with incomes of more than $1M who owe at least $250K in back taxes.
One red flag, according to the IRS, is ongoing discrepancies on balance sheets involving partnerships, with differences of millions of dollars between end-of-year balances compared to the beginning balances the following year. Those kinds of discrepancies have been increasing in recent years, the agency said.
Funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act will facilitate the audits, according to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel.
“The years of underfunding that predated the Inflation Reduction Act led to the lowest audit rate of wealthy filers in our history,” Werfel said in a statement. “I am committed to reversing this trend.”
The agency initially received $80B over a 10-year period from the IRA to ramp up enforcement efforts, including through the use of artificial intelligence, though about $20B of that was cut as part of the debt ceiling deal earlier this year.
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