Auditing the IRS: bad bookkeeping.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Citings - Internal Revenue Service - Brief article

How MUCH do Americans owe the Internal Revenue Service ? Even the tax man doesn't know for sure. According to a June report from the Government Accountability Office, the IRS used two separate accounting systems to keep track of how much taxpayers owed in 2009. Comparing the two systems revealed a discrepancy of $8 billion.

The report concluded that the IRS's books had suffered "a o breakdown in controls," finding a $5.1 billion "unexplained variance" between the money it recorded collecting and the money it actually took in. The agency in one case failed to properly record a...