Summary: GAO is monitoring the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) tracking of three fiscal year 1991 compliance initiatives. The three initiatives were designed to (1) revise IRS' training program for revenue agents so that experienced staff would spend less time training new staff and, as a result, have more time for audit work; (2) increase examination staff so that IRS could audit more returns; and (3) increase collection staff so that IRS could collect more delinquent accounts. The results for these initiatives were mixed. IRS used contract instructors less extensively than expected. Nonetheless, IRS reported that its opportunity cost savings from its training initiative were $4 million more than originally estimated. These additional savings resulted from the conservative approach IRS used in estimating first-year opportunity cost savings from this initiative. The examination initiative exceeded its staffing goal by 46 staff years, but lost almost $9 million more than IRS expected. This additional loss arose because opportunity costs associated with training new revenue agents were higher than anticipated. IRS did not meet its target for the total dollars collected from delinquent accounts in fiscal year 1991. Yet, IRS has said that the collection initiative achieved its revenue target of $38.7 million. IRS arrived at this conclusion by reducing the baseline against which initiative results were measured.
