ByKelly Phillips Erb,
Forbes Staff.
When people say they’ve been “audited,” they usually mean they received a letter from the IRS. But not every IRS letter signals an audit. It helps to understand how returns are selected — and how issues are handled once they’re identified.
Audit rates are typically very low. According to the 2024 IRS Data Book, the IRS closed roughly 500,000 audits across all return types while processing well over 150 million individual returns and other filings. In other words, well under 1% (about 1/3 of 1%) of individual returns are audited, and most taxpayers will never experience a formal examination.
That seems low, but it’s higher than some other well-known fears. In the U.S., your lifetime odds of being struck by lightning are about 1 in 15,300 (0.0065%), while the odds of being attacked by a shark are roughly 1 in 11,500,000 (0.000009%).
