Tax Audit Frequently Asked Questions

For the fiscal year 2009, about 1.4 million taxpayers were chosen for audit. This represents about 1% of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2008 -- pretty good odds. Of those, about 75% were correspondence, or "paper" audits, and the remaining 25% were field or "in person" audits. Even though the numbers of taxpayers audited are fairly low, anxiety about tax audits remains high.

Here, we tackle some of the most frequently asked tax audit questions: