Each year, we make more than 1,000 recommendations to help improve the federal government. We alert department heads to the recommendations where they can save the most money, address issues on our High Risk List, or significantly improve government operations. This report outlines our 24 priority open recommendations for the Internal Revenue Service as of April 2020. For example, 2 recommendati...

Improper payments—those made by the federal government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason—are a significant problem. In fiscal year 2019, government-wide improper payment estimates totaled about $175 billion. The law requires certain agencies to develop and monitor ways to reduce improper payments and take corrective actions to target their root causes. However,...

Individual retirement accounts (IRA) help taxpayers save for retirement. Most IRAs invest in assets like stocks and mutual funds, but some IRA owners want to invest in unconventional assets like real estate or virtual currency. IRS Publications 590-A and B offer guidance to taxpayers with IRAs, but details on unconventional assets are limited. For example, investing in some types of bullion is pe...

A 2009 law created a tax disparity among different types of tobacco products, with cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, and small cigars taxed at one rate and pipe tobacco and some large cigars taxed at lower rates. In a 2012 report, we found that tax revenue decreased after the law because manufacturers made and consumers bought more of the lower-taxed products. We previously recommended that Cong...

Businesses are responsible for paying taxes and must report their tax debts if they want federal contracts. Agencies are supposed to consider these debts before awarding contracts. However, we reviewed the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Army and Navy, and found that they may have inappropriately awarded more than 1,800 contracts to businesse...

In fiscal year 2016, the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) assessed its advance premium tax credit (PTC) program as susceptible to significant improper payments. CMS instituted a qualitative method for assessing the susceptibility of its program that was consistent with requirements, including assessing each of the nine required qualitati...

GAO's analysis found no evidence that use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has affected federal excise tax (FET) revenue from traditional cigarettes, which has been declining over time (see figure). Possible reasons for the lack of a detectable effect include the small size of the e-cigarette market (estimated at $2.5 billion in 2014) relative to the cigarette market ($80 billion in the sam...

More than 80 federal programs (including 6 tax expenditures) provide aid to people with low incomes, based on GAO's survey of relevant federal agencies. Medicaid (the largest by far), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) comprised almost two-thirds of fiscal year 2013 federal obli...

Early evidence suggests that the advance premium tax credit (APTC)—the refundable tax credit that can be paid on an advance basis—likely contributed to an expansion of health insurance coverage in 2014 because it significantly reduced the cost of exchange plans' premiums for those eligible. Although there are limitations to measuring the effects of the APTC using currently available data, surv...

GAO estimates that under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), about three-quarters of approximately 7 million children who were uninsured in January 2009 would be eligible for Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or the new premium tax credit. The remaining children had family incomes too high to be eligible, were noncitizens, or would be ine...