What is the 5 billion for?

[Ray From Cleveland]

Turbo Tax is an IRS dream. When they look for people to audit, it's people that do taxes themselves. When a professional preparer does it, signs their name, provides their certification number and stamp, you seldom get audited. In fact, I've never been audited my entire life.

Actually, that not really true. There are two ways to file, paper and e-file (better known as MeF), and that has no bearing on your likelihood of getting audited. MeF is an IRS dream only because it can be handled and processed faster, electronically, without a person physically sitting down and trying to read your scribble and go through the math line by line.

Same is true of professional preparers--- --- lots of people get taken by preparer scams because they put too much trust in the preparer. What triggers an audit is a number of things set up in an algorithm within their IDRS data system which catches things which simply don't make sense (smells fishy), sending the return to exam.

I knew somebody that actually worked at the IRS. He told me that there is a lot of truth to what I read. The computer does spit out various names and files as you stated, but an agent can't audit each one. It's each individual agent that decides on what they are going to look into. He told he most are honest mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. Those mistakes are rare when using a professional tax preparer.

Perhaps for short forms Trubo Tax is the way to go. But for complicated filings, it's better to have a well trained and experienced tax preparer sort out the mess.