When it comes to income-tax audits, there’s usually safety in numbers.
In any given year, the odds suggest the Internal Revenue Service will select someone else’s return for a closer look, rather than yours.
The IRS said it audited more than 1million individuals in fiscal 2012 for the sixth year in a row, collecting more than $50 billion for the third consecutive year.
While those numbers might seem high, audit rates are really quite low — affecting just 1.03 percent of all tax returns filed. To put that into perspective, the IRS said it prevented fraudulent refund payments on three times as many returns, 3 million, stemming from the unlawful theft of Social Security numbers and other personal information from legitimate taxpayers.
Read more: Some factors increase chance of audit
