The IRS yesterday (IR-2007-113) launched a new national research program for individuals in an attempt to close the tax gap:

IRS officials today announced plans to launch a new National Research Program (NRP) reporting compliance study for individual taxpayers that will provide updated and more accurate audit selection tools and support efforts to reduce the nation’s tax gap. The latest NRP study will be the first of an ongoing series of annual individual studies using an innovative multi-year rolling methodology. The study will start in October 2007 and examine about 13,000 randomly selected tax year 2006 individual returns. Similar sample sizes will be used in subsequent tax years.

An advantage of using this method, which combines results over rolling three-year periods, is the IRS will be able to make annual updates to compliance estimates and develop more efficient workload plans on an annual basis, after the initial three annual studies. Previous studies started from scratch, drew tax returns from a single tax year and involved examinations of more than 45,000 taxpayers.

The IRS also released updated tax gap information.