A paper released last month by tax guru Joel Slemrod and Andrew Johns of the IRS analyzing "newly available data from the IRS's most recent comprehensive study of individual income tax noncompliance, the National Research Program, [assesses] the distributional consequences of income tax noncompliance in the U.S. federal income tax for the tax year 2001." Slemrod and Johns find that "the ratio of aggregate misreported income to true income generally increases with income, although it peaks among taxpayers with adjusted gross income between $500,000 to $1,000,000, and is lower than the peak ratio for individuals with income above $1,000,000." In other words, the biggest tax cheats earn $500,000 to $1,000,000. And yet, in 2007, over 36 percent of all individual income tax audits (see table 9) performed by the IRS were on returns of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) claimants. And with the income ceiling for EITC eligibility is $37,783, I'm not so sure that this is very best strategy the IRS could pursue.