Wednesday, April 15, 2015

IRS CI Publishes Annual Report and Some Statistics (4/15/15)

IRS CI has issued its annual report.  IRS Criminal Investigation, Annual Business Report: Fiscal Year 2014 Operations, here.  Many of the key statistics appear also on the IRS CI website here.  For further drill down by program, see here, and the 10-year statistics are here.  The IRS Data Book presents annual statistics in a different but very useful format, here.

I have been keeping data drawn primarily from the IRS statistics.  I attach my latest spreadsheet here (zip file).  I have links in the spreadsheet to show the sources for the data.

The most interesting spreadsheet is Sheet1.  The data in Sheet1 indicate that for legal source prosecutions over the period from 2005 though 2014, the conviction rate is 84.7%.  (That is convictions over indictments for legal source prosecutions.) I won't try to correlate that the DOJ Tax's claims of a 95% (or thereabouts) conviction rate.  I know DOJ Tax's claims relates to all crimes it prosecutes and not just legal source tax crimes and DOJ Tax may prosecute some crimes not accounted for in the IRS data.

The conviction rate substantially increased in 2014, but (i) the single year numbers do not as easily smooth out year to year differences in the components (year of indictment and year of conviction) as do multi-year numbers and (ii), even focusing on 2014, there was a larger number of indictments in 2013 over 2012 and 2014, so the larger number of indictments in 2013 may have disproportionately contributed to the convictions in 2014.

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