Interesting/disturbing stuff from TRAC:

Despite a growing federal deficit, IRS audit efforts aimed at the nation's largest corporations have precipitously declined in the last few years and now are at an all time low, according to the analysis of agency data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

Among corporations reporting assets of $250 million or more, the IRS since FY 2005 has cut back by a third (33 percent) the hours it spends examining their books. IRS has also sharply reduced the number of large corporate returns it examines — these audits have fallen by 22 percent since 2005 (see Figure 1 and Table 1).

This has occurred even though IRS auditors uncover the largest dollar amounts of tax under-reporting in the books of these large corporations (see Table 2) and Congress has actually provided IRS with more revenue agents trained to handle complex returns such as these (see Table 3).