A lot of people think of the Internal Revenue Service as a top heavy, bungling, bureaucracy that has trouble getting out of its own way.
The Internal Revenue Service is a huge bureaucracy, that much is true, but it is streamlined when it comes to catching tax cheats.
The Internal Revenue Service is the best collection agency in the world, and they are becoming better and better detectives, too.
If you owe the Internal Revenue Service money, chances are that they are looking for you.
The agency will comb records like the DMV, bank accounts, real estate tax information, utility accounts, voter registration, and more.
Most people can be found through one of the more standard searches of which we have just given examples, but if they can't, the Internal Revenue Service can utilize other searches at their disposal.
These days, the IRS will look for you on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
Even before that, they will do a Google search to see if it turns you up.
If you think it's cool that old friends and classmates can find you through social networking, remember that the IRS can find you that way, too.
One of the newest areas of fraud detection the Internal Revenue Service has begun to converge on is mortgage interest.
It seems that mortgage interest is an item greatly abused by tax cheaters who want to decrease their tax liability illegitimately.
Some people have started the process of under-reporting their earnings while still claiming their full mortgage interest as a deduction.
In many cases, when the Internal Revenue Service crunches the numbers, the agency discovers that there is no way a person with this income could be making these mortgage payments.
The red flag goes up, the taxpayer is audited and revealed to be a cheat.
This is one of the reasons it never pays to be dishonest on your income tax return or to get carried away with deductions.
The Internal Revenue Service will not reveal the details that trigger a tax audit, but you can bet that taking too many deductions in consideration of income has got to be one of them.
It is the job of the Internal Revenue Service to do analysis, and they are pretty good at it.
You do not want to believe that somewhere some person or some computer is going over all your past records and doing a comparison between them and your current records, simply in an effort to, possibly, catch you cheating.
"No one would go to all that trouble," you say.
"You are just being paranoid", you might tell me.
Just remember that it's not paranoia, if they are really after you.