What are our s Auditors Looking for When they Auto to Return? IRS auditors essentially are looking for mistakes. The IRS is comparing the return that was filed versus the substantiation that you're providing and matching it to see if there's any additional tax due and owing specifically there are a few things that probably triggered the audit, so the auditor is going to be looking for specific issues on the return what issues those are is a hard thing to say but it depends on everybody's individual facts and circumstances for example a taxpayer may have earned a certain level of income over two years and that has a significant reduction in income in the third year the IRS we may want to know "why the taxpayer had such a significant reduction in income" but essentially the auditor is going through and looking for errors and looking for adjustments that they can make in order to get additional tax to the government if those errors start to add up or the taxpayer is unable to substantiate the deductions and the income that they took on the return then the IRS auditor will is issue penalties in connection with that I'd like to believe that most auditors go into the process with good faith and my experience has been more positive than not in this arena there, but the IRS is like any other organization there are good people within that organization and there are bad people within that organization but ultimately the auditor is going to do their job good or bad they're going to go through the audit they're gonna find the mistakes and they're gonna assess how much tax they think is due and the best thing that you can do to mitigate it is to build a plan to prepare for that and to make your presentation as mistake-free as possible so that you can get through the other.