how did the IRS or any other revenue agency audit dozens of millions of paper tax returns every year before computers were common?

Question

How did they verify if someone committed fraud or tax evasion in the 1950s for example?

In: 19

Answer 1

The boring answer is that they kind of didn’t really find as much in the past as they do now. Instead, they made sensible decisions on what kind of things to look for, *”this year we are looking extra at all deductions for X and Y”*.

Say, deductible travel expenses AND declarations on property sales, just to name something.

If you didn’t do travel deductions and didn’t sell a property that year, you wouldn’t get audited unless something at a quick glance looked really weird with the numbers.