Tax Administration

" One way IRS works to understand taxpayer compliance is by operating NRP, which conducts audits or examinations of individual tax returns in a research sample. NRP examinations are fewer in number but more detailed than IRS's regular, operational examinations, which focus on the tax returns most likely to have substantive noncompliance. GAO was asked to study whether NRP procedures could improve IRS's operational examinations. In this report, GAO (1) describes the lessons on examination procedures that IRS learned from conducting NRP examinations; and (2) assesses whether additional improvements could be made to operational examinations based on IRS's NRP experience. GAO reviewed documentation on NRP procedures and interviewed relevant officials. GAO did structured interviews with IRS examiners on ideas for improving operational examinations, reviewed IRS documents, and compared the potential impacts of the ideas to criteria, such as whether the changes would make examinations more efficient or accurate. "