As you can imagine, with the economy still reeling and tax collections dropping the importance of the governments' oversight of our system of taxes becomes ever more critical. From both the federal and state levels we continue to read about new and improved compliance measures being put in place. Take one of the recent announcements at the end of 2009 from the IRS as an example.

The IRS has announced it will conduct intensive employment tax audits under its National Research Program (NRP) starting in 2010. This is a multi-year program with random audits scheduled to begin in February 2010. The IRS has said it will audit U.S. companies under this program. The NRP is a study and data collection project that helps the IRS update its noncompliance estimates and update its computer-based audit programs. "Normal" audits do not yield as valuable compliance data as random audits because the IRS, in normal audits, is intentionally targeting the taxpayers they believe have noncompliance problems. NRP audits on the other hand, are random to allow the IRS to statistically measure the total amount of noncompliance in a specific area. The IRS then uses this data to update its computers and estimates of the tax gap—the difference between total taxes owed and the amount actually paid by taxpayers.