Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, an IRS audit is expensive. Congress learned that the Internal Revenue Service singled-out donors to Tea Party groups, auditing their tax returns ten times as frequently as for regular taxpayers.
The House Ways and Means Committee announced that the IRS subjected 10% of those donors to audits, compared to only 1% on average for everybody else.
As one attorney described the burden: “It has cost them their retirement; it has cost them tens of thousands of dollars to fight the IRS; it’s expensive.”