3 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] thread
I'd expect the most likely audited place to be sparsely populated. Smaller populations are inherently more variable

-- from Kanheman and Tversky

The term "the law of small numbers" was coined by Tversky and Kahneman (1971) to describe how people exaggerate the degree to which the probability distribution in a small group will closely resemble the probability distribution in the overall population.

Is the IRS's goal to find the most number of incorrect returns, or find the returns with the highest-dollar mistakes? Sounds like it's the first, but probably should be the 2nd.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish comes to mind.

Don't worry, with 87,000 new agents, they can do both!